Stature of boys post World War II migrants

Poland is a country with significant regional differences in socio-economic, demographic and epidemiological phenomena. This is partly due to its history; notably the division of Poland among three different countries and the change of the borders after the second World War. The latter caused massive migratory movements of population. Then from the territory which now constitutes one third of Poland, Germans were evicted and Poles settled. These, then new, Western and Northern Territories of Poland (WNTP) are still the most developed parts of Poland with better roads, better housing and easier access to medical service and schools. On the other hand, some of the statistical data concerning the health and lifestyle of the population of these parts of Poland are worse than the corresponding data concerning the rest of Poland. For example the rate of lung cancer, the rate of divorce, the rate of adolescence pregnancies, the rate of cigarette smoking and alcohol consumption are all higher in the WNTP. In 1955, a very comprehensive anthropological nationwide survey of school children was performed. Our findings based on this material exhibit a number of phenomena which might contribute to the explanation of these negative population data. We have observed that the boys born in various regions of pre-war Poland and settled with their parents in the new territories were of different height at the age of 7-18 years than those from the four other regions of Poland whose parents were not resettled. Also the average height of boys, those sons of the migrants who during post-war migration did not go to the west but settled in the central region of Poland, was greater than those who settled in the west of Poland. Our results indicate that among the migrants there was a considerable fraction of people who were physically weaker and less socially adapted in comparison to the rest of the Polish population and that these characteristics have been passed down to the subsequent generation.