The áʼíhistory of the Baháʼí Faith in Poland begins in the 1870s when Polish writer Walerian Jablonowski wrote several articles covering the religion's early history in Persia. There was a Polish-language translation of Paris Talks published in 1915. After becoming a Baháʼí in 1925, Poland's Lidia Zamenhof returned to Poland in 1938 as its first well-known Baháʼí. During the period of the Warsaw Pact, Poland adopted the Soviet policy of oppression of religion, so Poland's Baháʼí community, strictly adhering to its principle of obedience to legal government, abandoned its administration and properties. An analysis of publications before and during this period found that coverage by Soviet-based sources was basically hostile to the Baháʼí Faith while native Polish coverage was neutral or positive. By 1963, only Warsaw was recognized as having a Baháʼí community. Following the fall of communism in Poland because of the Revolutions of 1989, the Baháʼís in Poland began to initiate contact with each other and have meetings; the first of these arose in Kraków and Warsaw. In March 1991, the first Baháʼí Local Spiritual Assembly was re-elected in Warsaw. Poland's National Spiritual Assembly was elected in 1992. According to Baháʼí sources there were about 300 Baháʼís in Poland in 2006 and there have been several articles in Polish publications in 2008 covering the persecution of Baháʼís in Iran and Egypt. The Association of Religion Data Archives (relying on World Christian Encyclopedia) estimated that there were about 300 Baháʼís in 2005.
Early period
The earliest known articles in Polish were written by Aleksander Walerian Jabłonowski in the 1870s after he had met the Baháʼís in Baghdad, and one of these was to defend the Baháʼí Faith against an erroneous article in another publication. Isabella Grinevskaya was the pen name of a very early Russian Baháʼí born in Grodno, and her father is buried in Warsaw. Grodno was sometimes part of Poland and Belarus but during her entire lifetime was part of Russia. She is well known because of a play of hers performed in 1903 called Báb. In the 1910s some Jews in a regiment from Poland while stationed in Turkmenistan came into contact with the Baháʼís there. Later the rector of the Catholic University of Lublin met ʻAbdu'l-Bahá in 1914 while he lived in Palestine, and in 1915 a Polish translation of Paris Talks was published in Silesia.
Lidia Zamenhof
Around 1925 Zamenhof became a member of the Baháʼí Faith. Zamenhof was the official representative of the religion to the dedication of the monument erected upon the grave of her father in Warsaw in 1926. Some Canadian Baháʼís visited Poland in the early 1930s while Zamenhof went to the United States in late 1937 to teach the religion as well as Esperanto. In December 1938 she returned to Poland, where she continued to teach and translated Baháʼu'lláh and the New Era (see John Esslemont), The Hidden Words and Some Answered Questions. While Zamenhof worked on the translations publication was delayed and accomplished out of France by a Polish nephew of Anne Lynch then in a Swiss internment camp for Polish officers. In the second half of 1938 Zamenhof was a major influence of the conversion of the first known Ukrainian becoming a Baháʼí, who was living in eastern Poland at the time. Zamenhof mentions there were five Baháʼís in Poland in August 1939. Contact was made in 1947 with nine individuals investigating the religion mostly through Esperantist writings. One of them offered Zamenhof a hiding place she had declined. She was arrested and eventually killed at the Treblinka extermination camp in the autumn of 1942.