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Like most countries, Poland has experienced racism in various forms and to various extents over the course of its history.

Jews
See History of the Jews in Poland

The history of the Jews in Poland dates back over a millennium. For centuries, Poland was home to the largest and most significant Jewish community in the world. Poland was the centre of Jewish culture thanks to a long period of statutory religious tolerance and social autonomy. This ended with the Partitions of Poland, in particular, with the persecution of Jews by Tsarist Russian authorities. During World War II there was a nearly complete genocidal destruction of the Polish Jewish community by Nazi Germany in the 1939–1945 German occupation of Poland and the ensuing Holocaust. Since the fall of communism there has been a Jewish revival in Poland, characterized by the annual Jewish Culture Festival, new study programmes at Polish high schools and universities, the work of synagogues such as the Nozyk, and the Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

18th century
Russia remained unaffected by the liberalising tendencies of this era with respect to the status of Jews. Before the 18th century Russia maintained an exclusionary policy towards Jews, in accordance with the anti-Jewish precepts of the Russian Orthodox Church. When asked about admitting Jews into the Empire, Peter the Great stated "I prefer to see in our midst nations professing Mohammedanism and paganism rather than Jews. They are rogues and cheats. It is my endeavor to eradicate evil, not to multiply it." More active discriminatory policies began when the partition of Poland in the 18th century which resulted, for the first time in Russian history, in the possession of land with a large population of Jews. This land was designated as the Pale of Settlement from which Jews were forbidden to migrate into the interior of Russia. In 1772, Catherine II forced the Jews of the Pale of Settlement to stay in their shtetls and forbade them from returning to the towns that they occupied before the partition of Poland.

Warsaw Pogrom of 1881
The Warsaw pogrom was a pogrom that took place in Russian-controlled Warsaw on December 25–27, 1881, then part of Vistula Land in the Russian Empire. A contemporary Jewish-Russian historian, Simon Dubnow, gives details of the pogrom: on Christmas Day 1881 the outbreak of panic after a false warning of fire in the crowded Holy Cross Church resulted in the deaths of twenty-nine persons in a stampede. It was believed that the false alarm was raised by pickpockets, who used the ruse to allow them to rob people during the panic. A crowd gathered on the scene of the event and some unknown persons started to spread a rumour, which subsequently proved to be unfounded, that two Jewish pickpockets had been caught in the church.

The mob began to attack Jews, Jewish stores, businesses, and residences in the streets adjoining the Holy Cross Church. The riots in Warsaw continued for three days, until Russian authorities (who controlled the police as well as military in the city) intervened, arresting 2,600 people. During the Warsaw pogrom two people were left dead and twenty-four injured. The pogrom also left about a thousand Jewish families financially devastated. In the months afterwards about one thousand Warsaw Jews emigrated to the United States. The pogrom worsened Polish-Jewish relations, and was criticized by Polish writer Eliza Orzeszkowa and several other notable activists.

Ghetto benches
Ghetto benches or the "bench Ghetto" (Polish: getto ławkowe) was a form of official segregation in the seating of students, introduced in Poland's universities beginning in 1935 at Lwow Polytechnic. By 1937, when this practice became conditionally legalized, most rectors at other higher education institutions had adopted this form of segregation. Under the ghetto ławkowe system, Jewish university students were forced, under threat of expulsion, to sit in a left-hand side section of the lecture halls reserved exclusively for them. This official policy of enforced segregation was often accompanied by acts of violence directed against Jewish students by members of the ONR (delegalised already after three months in 1934) and other extreme right and anti-Semitic organizations.

Holocaust
Anti-Jewish violence in Poland, 1944–1946 Kielce pogrom in 1946

1968 Polish political crisis
The Polish 1968 political crisis, also known in Poland as March 1968 or the March events (Marzec 1968; wydarzenia, wypadki marcowe) pertains to the major student and intellectual protest action against the communist government of the People's Republic of Poland. The crisis resulted in the suppression of student strikes by security forces in all major academic centres across the country and the subsequent repression of the Polish dissident movement, as well as a mass emigration following the "anti-Zionist" campaign waged by General Secretary Władysław Gomułka. The protests coincided with the events of Prague spring in neighboring Czechoslovakia – raising new hopes of democratic reforms among the intelligentsia – and culminated in the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia on 20 August 1968.

The government's anti-Jewish campaign began already in 1967. It was a well-orchestrated response to the Soviet withdrawal of all diplomatic relations with Israel after the Six Day War – with factory workers across Poland forced to publicly denounce Zionism. The subsequent purges within the communist party, led by Interior Minister Mieczysław Moczar (b. Nikola Demko) and his faction, failed to topple Gomułka's government, but resulted in an actual expulsion from Poland of thousands of individuals of Jewish ancestry, including professionals, party officials and the secret police functionaries blamed "for a major part, if not all, of the crimes and horrors of the Stalinist period." Before the end of 1971, 12,927 Poles of Jewish origin emigrated. On the 30th anniversary of their departures a memorial plaque was placed at Warszawa Gdańska train station, from which most of exiled people took a train to Vienna.

Żydokomuna

Africans
See also Black Africans in Poland On 23 May 2010, a Nigerian street vendor, Maxwell Itoya, died after being shot by police at an open-air market in Warsaw. The circumstances were controversial. Itoya had been living in Poland for eight years and was married to a Pole. 32 other black traders were rounded up and arrested after some of them began throwing stones at the police following his shooting.

John Godson is Poland's first black Member of Parliament and a member of the Civic Platform party.

The word Murzyn is a Polish word for a black person. It is seen by some as a neutral word, but others consider it to have pejorative connotations. Notably, the noun murzyn appears in a popular Polish saying which refers to any menial work performed by a Pole for the benefit of his or her potential adversaries, "Murzyn zrobił swoje, murzyn może odejść" ("Black man did his deed, black man can go now"). Murzynek Bambo is a very popular children's poem depicting an African boy in Africa. It has been criticised for its portrayal of Bambo as fearing baths, in case his colour washes off and leaves him white.

Roma
The Mława pogrom was a series of violent incidents in June 1991 when a rioting mob attacked Roma residents of the Polish town of Mława causing hundreds to flee in terror. The violence, described as motivated by racism and jealousy, received editorial condemnation from international media.

Football
In 2008 Mihir Bose described this situation in Poland thusly: "I found racism that was strident and in your face in a way it never was in Britain, even in the very bad old days of English football in the 1970s and 80s. [...] Then, as one of the regular football reporters at the Sunday Times, I spent my Saturdays at football matches and had several first-hand experiences of racism. Much of it was very unpleasant. But in Poland it was on a different, deeper and much nastier level."

In 2011, the NEVER AGAIN Association published a report into Racism in football in the two countries due to host the 2012 European Football Championship, Poland and Ukraine. It covered an 18 month period lasting from September 2009 until March 2011, during which it noted 195 racial incidents in both Poland and Ukraine. Of these, 133 took place in Poland. Of the total 195, 105 concerned the use of fascist and far-right symbols, 36 were anti-Semitic and 20 were anti-black.

Easing the passing
It was one of these, Easing the Passing, that led to further tut-tutting in the Temple about Pat Devlin. This was an account of the acquittal of Dr John Bodkin Adams of Eastbourne. It is one of the best books ever written about a trial. This is not altogether surprising, because Devlin was the judge. I suspect, however, that what annoyed assorted silks and benchers was not so much that he had breached convention (if, indeed, he had) in writing about a trial over which he had presided as that he was, in the course of the work, rude about the prosecuting counsel, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, the Attorney-General, later Lord Dilhorne, the Lord Chancellor. He referred to him disrespectfully throughout as 'Reggie' and cast persistent doubt on both his intelligence and his application. The latter charge, at least, was unfair. For Reggie was to do the reverse of what Devlin had done. Having served his brief term on the Woolsack and been succeeded by Labour's Gerald Gardiner, he put his head down, read a few books and some law reports, and turned himself into a thoroughly competent Lord of Appeal.

Nor were Pat's motives for being so scornful of Reggie of the purest. He admits as much in the book. Lord Goddard, one of his mentors, wanted Devlin to succeed him at some time as Lord Chief Justice. So, at one stage, did Devlin. Somewhere, somehow, Reggie got himself in the way of this plot. As Reggie never became LCJ anyway, and the notion that the Attorney has a reversion on the job is a constitutional myth, Devlin's account does not make complete sense. But there it is.

There was another reason why Devlin was viewed with some suspicion in circles that were in both senses conservative. It lay in his chairmanship of the Nyasaland Commission in 1959. It is difficult to recall now the importance which Africa assumed in the Conservative party even up to 1980, when Lady Thatcher finally handed Southern Rhodesia over to the most recent despot. In the 1950s and the 1960s the dark continent had occupied much the same position as Europe does today. In his report Devlin described Nyasaland as 'a police state'. Naturally this did not please the Conservative government of the day. 

Gwynne's horse
As the film Warhorse reminds us, horses were a serious issue for many caught up in the first world war. Hunting on the top of the South Downs this month, I noticed the odd gait of a mare in front of me. Her hind legs seemed low-slung in relation to her body, like those of a giraffe.

I asked the Master, Julia Caffyn, who was riding her, and she explained that the unusual shape was the result of breaking her ilium when a foal. Mrs Caffyn had been particularly anxious to keep the mare, whose name is Miss Whiskers, because she is in direct line from the battle-charger of her great-uncle, Sir Roland Gwynne.

Gwynne was wounded at the Somme.

Not wanting his beloved mare Jane to stay in France with some other officer, he persuaded his orderly to starve her deliberately enough to be shipped back to England. Then, from his hospital bed, he got a neighbour to pay the local farmers not to bid for her at auction at the Southampton remount depot, and bought her himself. He took Jane home, and got her pregnant to avoid requisition. Later he had her covered by a better horse. The strangely shaped but pretty mare I was standing beside is the eventual, ninth-generation, result. She herself is now expecting a foal in June, carried, in deference to her youthful injury, by a surrogate mother.