50 Zlotych

Bank Polski's 1919 series was issued in the immediate aftermath of Poland regaining independence, with the country's financial infrastructure essentially being built from scratch. Having no domestic printing capacity equal to the task, the provisional government contracted the Banque de France to produce the notes in Paris — a practical arrangement that also lent the new currency a degree of credibility it could not yet earn domestically.

The watermark is the only security measure on P#56, a thin defence by any standard, and counterfeiting of the early Polish emission notes was a genuine problem during the inflationary years that followed.