Why Poland is Divided

Poland has seen a lot of divisions, why are they still visible today?

Adam Zamoyski, 'Poland: A history' (2015).

Hi there, my name is Jochem Boodt. I make the show The Present Past, where I show how the present has been influenced by the past. History, but connected to the present and fun!

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[MrJaswedrowniczek]

I just want to clarify few facts:
1. In Poland in 2023 it is extremely hard to find building without a toilet.
2. Map description states "percentage of flats without a toilet" it does not state that those flats have no access to one. For example you may have a old social housing with very small flats with shared toilet/lavatory for each flor of the building. Most of statistical data comes form years prior of 1989(Polish People Republic ). It is possible that data might not have been properly updated because in Poland (unlike in USA) many changes to a private building are not subject to building permit (you just declare that changes are going to be made ). I find it hard to believe that such big percentage of flats has no individual toilets. It leads me to believe this map might be connected to social housing data.
3. Social hosing in Poland is long and interesting story, but in nutshell a lot of buildings for less cooperative tenants (for example drunks )will have shared toilets because government is obliged to give them shelter and it is much cheaper to make a 20 flats per floor with just few toilets and showers. Plus it is easier to maintain and check for damage ( copper piping, radiators and anything that can be ripped out of the wall is a welcome source of income for above mentioned citizens).
4. Why in eastern Poland toilets were outside ? They used to be. In 1920's after defining Russians Felicjan Sławoj Składkowski (polish prime minster, doctor, freemason, Polish Army General) has made it his mission to improve medical standard of living for common people and forced local authorities to encourage building latrines in rural areas. People at first didn't understand the importance of clean water and made fun of him calling those toilets "slawoiki". Why outside ? Because there were no sewage systems in rural parts of Poland. They would dig a pit and put a wooden outhouse/WC on top of it . Later after WWII those pits would evolve to become septic tanks connected to indor toilet. But in many places outhouses were left as additional toilets. Currently almost everyone has access to toilet in Poland.
5. Yes mentally you can see a big difference between different parts of Poland and how people think. You can se influence of prussian, austrian and russian occupation on their mentality and how they behave.

[czwarty]

From 2020 data the percentage of homes with indoor toilets in Poland is 94%. Of remaining 6% majority comes from pre-war tenements, which were built with shared toilets per floor - not outhouses. First 13 seconds of your video and it's already nonsense

[Rude_i_Wredne]

Couple comments from a native:

First of all, you skipped a MAJOR point in this history which was the Napolleonic wars, when Poland briefly gained "independence". After Napolleon was defeated, this French satellite state was occupied by Tzar Russia and the Tzar called himself the King of Poland and the process of unifying this new Poland into Russia began. That's why the so called divide between "Poland A" and "Poland B" doesn't follow the 1795 partition borders, it follows the 1815 ones.

Second, minor correction - Gdańsk was Polish prior to partitions, so it wasn't that long gone. However Szczecin and Wrocław haven't been under direct Polish control since the Piast dynasty, so almost 1000 years.

Third, minor correction as well - the area in the north east you've shown around 5:00 isn't a big metropolitan area, but rather it's the area where the Lukashenka-caused migrant crisis is the strongest. Although the remaining two red spots are Warszawa, Łódź and Kraków respectively.

And in terms of those pesky bathrooms - the eastern Poland is way less urbanized and it's a common practice in the Polish countryside to build so called "latrynas", moving the toilet part of the bathroom outside of the house, for the simple reason that there is no sewage system connected to those remote farms. In general it's not that practical to build bathrooms when you still get your water from a well of sorts.
As far as I know, the urban apartments build by communists usually have bathrooms inside. There are also some rare instances where the less "exclusive" flats could have had a bathroom shared with couple of neighbours, but I don't know whether that counts for the statistics.

[DominiqEffect]

In Poland we have a running joke about, when we see a map of Poland no matter of the subject it show we say: "widać zabory" - it mean: we can cleary see partitions of Poland time period. We even use this joke phrase when the weather forecast is show.

[Pawel_Mrozek]

In Poland we used to say "The only maps of Poland where you don't see partitions are geological maps"

[JamesL]

Because when Russia and Austria owned the Eastern parts, they didn't care for them as they were still ethnically Polish, so their development was slow over those 100+ years of Poland being occupied. Meanwhile the "German" half was treated not as a foreign subject, but as an integral part of Germany as it was ethnically German in many areas and colonised by Germans in others, so it received far more development and industrialisation. It also helped that Germany was an industrial power far more so than Austria or Russia too, so naturally the German areas would be more industrialised, "modern" and western. Them being more transient and therefore less traditional and more progressive also makes a lot of sense.

[georgebalan]

We have exactly the same situation in Romania, where borders of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire are clearly visible in all these aspects of society, social development, economics, political choices, not to mention architecture...

[terennNR]

Wprowadzanie ludzi w błąd. Przyjedźcie do Polski zobaczycie jak tu jest pokazywanie map że nie ma toalety w domach to jakaś paranoja. Nie znam domu gdzie nie ma toalety nawet na wsi tak samo telefon i wodociągi są prawie wszędzie.

[wojtekpolska]

FYI its not that these houses dont have bathrooms and ppl crap in outhouses. its just that in these areas rarely the buildings (kamienice) to have a shared bathroom for multiple people living on the same floor (kind of like bathrooms in cheap hotels where you have to go out of your room and use a shared bathroom)
BUT thats still not the majority, even in the areas that are in white, look at key of this map, its kinda ridiculous, they put 56%-80% in the same colour on the key. even in the white areas, the majority of people still have their own bathrooms in their house.

basically for all the map keys, its just kind of ridiculous colouring, same with the housing one, they put 30%-80% in the same colour, thats just stupid.

[nilsmadej]

As we say "widać zabory"

The division is well known and a meme of sorts.

[whfn]

As a polish person who's family lives not far from Przemysl I can confirm that my parents didn't have a toilet indoors when they were growing up simply because it was cheaper to build a small shack with a bench and a hole in it rather than buy pipes, a ceramic toilet, water pump, make a septic tank out of concrete and also connect the well to the house with pipes. To my grandparents this would be quite an investment and considering they were still in process of building their 3 story house by hand, they just didn't have the time or money. However now I can proudly say they installed toilet around 17-20 years ago😁.

[zyrafff_]

I'm Polish and I want to say something about the toilets. These were just easier to make outside, because when the houses on the eastern part of Poland were built, in many places there were just no sewers. Have a nice day :)

[patrykkulpok]

Breslau didn't "become" Wrocław. as a border region between German states, Poland, Czech and Austria has complicated history. The city was probably founded by the Czech duke Vratislav I. In Czech language, Wrocław is literally Vratislav. It was here that great European conflicts took place: the Hussite Wars, the Thirty Years' War, the Silesian Wars, the Napoleonic Wars and finally the fighting during World War II in 1945. Before 1945 Wrocław/Breslau had German and Polish history.

[Artur_M.]

I'm sorry, but this video is very shallow in some aspects. You jump from 1795 straight to 1922 and then attempt to analyse and explain the lasting legacy of pre-1918 imperial borders. But anyone paying attention can see that these borders look nothing like those in 1795. That's because they were drawn in 1815 at the Congress of Vienna, one of many important things you didn't address at all.

At around 5:00 you highlighted five areas outside of Western Poland, where the opposition decisively won, describing them as bigger cities. This applies to three of them: Kraków, Łódź (my city), and Warsaw with the surrounding area, but very much *not* to the two in the very east. That considerable area by the Belarusian border, aside from the middle-sized city of Białystok, is very rural. It even includes the Białowieża primaeval forest. And that part in the very south-eastern corner of the country is an even more sparsely populated relative wilderness of the Bieszczady Mountains. It would suggest that other factors might be at play beyond the simple "rural areas are conservative, urban areas are progressive". But why let complex reality get in the way of simplistic explanations?
Before anyone asks, no, I'm not a PiS supporter.

I strongly recommend checking out the channel Sir Manatee. It's run by a German history student from Göttingen, who (among other topics) made several very good videos about Polish history in the XIX and early XX centuries, including its intersections with German history. He actually bothered to learn how to pronounce Polish names before attempting to educate the world about Poland. Imagine that. Speaking of pronunciation, I also recommend the video "How to read in Czech and Polish" made by an Australian. It's not that hard:

[marcosv.]

I am a portuguese living in Poland for 20 years, in Malopolska, and I am a Geography teacher - hence, I do pay attention to stats. The information you are trying to pass is wrong, as is the idea behind it. Certainly, most houses have bathrooms inside - what many of these houses have is septic tanks, rather than being connected to the sewage network, which for statistical purposes is often perceived as not having sewage at all, since you do not pay taxes for it. Please, inform yourself better before saying such things... or just visit the places first!

[g.peters]

I live in a medium-sized city in western Poland. I have my theory why western Poland is less conservative and more open to the world. It must be remembered that a huge part of the ancestors of the inhabitants of western Poland come from the very conservative east. After the war, my city was inhabited by people resettled from Vilnius, Lviv, Brest, Poznan and Lublin. Many soldiers from the Polish army in the west also settled there, as well as many forced Polish laborers returning from Germany. Various traditions, cultures and dialects met in one city. Families from different regions of pre-war Poland lived in one house. All families suffered serious wounds from the German and Russian occupation. They learned to live together and tolerate regional traditions and customs brought from their home regions. A Catholic lived next to a communist atheist, a believing communist, an Orthodox Christian or a Greek Catholic. From birth, we were aware that someone might have a different way of life.

[lisamirako]

In post-war western Poland, the lands of the expropriated and expelled Germans were only privatized to a small extent and nationalized to a large extent, in contrast to the old Polish regions. This explains the difference in the extent of collectivization between the two parts of the country during the communist period.

[tohuvabohugbanshee]

Modern Poland borders sure do look different from Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but aside from addition of East Prussia (the northeastern region) it's actually pretty close to what the first borders of Poland looked like (under the king Bolesław Chrobry). The areas west were under German rule for a long time, but they were originally (well, at least if we take only the last 1000 years into account) within Poland's borders with a mix of slavic and germanic ethnicity (during a large part of the middle ages it used to be that city dwellers were often German speakers and those living in the country spoke Polish. It was really a time when ethnicity didn't matter that much, nations in a modern sense are a rather new concept of the last 200 years or so. You were a subject of your king and you didn't care that much if he's even speaking the same language as you, in feudalism you felt more community and union with people from the same social strata as yours rather than ethnicity)

[szymenxd]

The fact that the Congress Poland was completely omitted kinda ruins the whole video.

[almerakbar]

One small criticism, the statistic maps often look more like the pre-WW1 congress poland borders, but in your analysis you used the WW1-WW2 borders and how that changed. Seems like a tiny oversight but it could jeopardize the entirety of the analysis