Why Poland is Divided

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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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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 :)

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.

As we say "widać zabory" The division is well known and a meme of sorts.

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😁.

My Greate Grandfather always said " You don't shit where you eat" in polish " Nie sraj tam gdzie jesz". So toilets were built outside of the house.

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.

Okay but the thumbnail is straight up a clickbait, there are toilets everywhere in Poland

This title is misleading. It implies that half the country doesnt have a indoor bathroom... this map just shows that theres more outhouses in the eastern part, the country side..

When saying poland was moved west into german land is silly because it was nearly all polish found land during teg Piast dynasty

Silesia was extremely well suited for industrialization: coal, iron ore, and rivers (for transport).

Breslau didn't "become" Wrocław. Silesia-Schlesien-Śląsk-Ślůnsk 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.

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)