 Very few Belarusians, mostly from Jewish-Belarusian families, came to the USA between the late 1930s and the end of 1941.In the post-World War II period, from 1948 to the early 1950s about 50,000 Belarusians immigrated to the United States; most of them left Europe for political reasons.These immigrants were former prisoners of war from the Polish and Soviet armies, persons who had worked in Germany as "Ostarbeiters" during the World War II, former émigrés who left Belarus shortly after the war or in 1939 when the Soviets attacked Poland, refugees who had fled Belarus in 1943 or 1944, and defectors and dissidents after World War II.