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Towns such as Siedlce in the depressed east have now been emptied by large-scale emigration to the West. Statistics show that 14 per cent of employers recently reported labour shortages, compared with 8 per cent in the first quarter of 2004. The town, which is part of the historical province of Lesser Poland, was most probably founded some time before 15th century and was first mentioned under the name of Siedlecz in a document of 1448. In 1503 Daniel Siedlecki erected a new village of the same name nearby and a church in the middle. In 1547 the town, created out of a merger of the two villages, was granted Magdeburg rights by King Sigismund the Old. Until 1807, when it was confiscated by the Russian authorities, it remained a private property of several notable magnate families, among them Czartoryski and Ogiński. Up to the Second World War, like many other cities in Europe, Siedlce had a significant Jewish population: according to Russian census of 1897, out of the total population of 23,700, Jews constituted 11,400 (so around 48% percent). During the World War II more than 50% of all buildings in the city, including a historical town hall, were destroyed. The Jewish population perished in the Holocaust. |