Why Poland is Divided 🇵🇱 | American reacts

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]That's pretty interesting. This is where it's about to get juicy. That is insanely complex. That's so random. Like this is blowing my mind right now.

[00:00:07]That's actually incredibly fascinating.

[00:00:11]What is up? Welcome back. Today we're reacting to a video titled why Poland is divided. I've been learning so much about Poland and it's been incredible, but I need to know more. What's up? If you haven't met me yet, my name is Aaron and this is Aaron on a reacts. Through this channel, we're discovering everything about Europe. People, culture, sports, countries, anything you can imagine we're discovering. The goal of this channel is to laugh together, to learn together, and to have fun together. So, if you want to do all those things with me, make sure to like and subscribe. Before we get started, I drop a video every single day. Now, we'll see why Poland's divided.

[00:00:47]This is a map of the most recent Polish elections.

[00:00:50]>> [music] >> Okay.

[00:00:51]>> clearly see where the conservative government has been defeated by progressive opposition. Wait, no. This is actually a map of all the houses that have bathrooms. This is a map of the most recent Polish uh Oh.

[00:01:05]Houses built before 1945. This is embarrassing. Wait. This is the map of the most recent [music] election.

[00:01:13]Why do all these maps look the same?

[00:01:18]This is Poland in 1635.

[00:01:21]And together with Lithuania, they have a very big country. In modern times, you would have Ukraine here and Belarus. And for some reason, Sweden is hanging out in Estonia?

[00:01:34]I hope. And by the time of Napoleon, it didn't exist anymore. Poland was unlucky because it was surrounded by some state that decided to become superpowers.

[00:01:43]Russia, [music] Habsburg Empire, and the Prussian Empire. They saw Poland as this sort of playground, and they just decided to gobble it all up. Wow.

[00:01:52]>> be 123 years before the Poles would see their country again.

[00:02:02]When they got occupied, people were making the first hot air balloons. And by the time Poland resurged, they were making televisions.

[00:02:10]And not long after that, Wait, real quick. One real quick plug there. I'm pretty sure a Pole came up with television. Like created the first color television. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure.

[00:02:20]>> the podcast was invented. I listen to podcasts a lot, like all the [music] time.

[00:02:25]When cooking, showering, or listening to other podcasts. But sometimes my favorite podcast can't keep up with my listening speed, which means I am alone with the existential dread of my existence.

[00:02:38]>> Wow.

[00:02:39]Hey, it's [clears throat] 1922, and it's after the First World War, and Poland is back on the map. Wow, Poland looks huge.

[00:02:44]>> the Poland we know, but you know, something.

[00:02:48]It does, however, confuse Stalin and Hitler so much that they quickly go back to bringing Poland into its occupied state. Like so.

[00:02:56]>> Okay. And after they introduced their ideas of minimalist architecture in Warsaw and other places, finally, we get Poland.

[00:03:05]Now, this is the Poland we do know.

[00:03:07]Let's take a moment to reflect on the position of Poland over the years. It's moved a lot. After the Second World War, they moved to the west. So, they lost all this land to the Soviets, Wow. and they gained all this land. Land that had been in the hands of Wait, real quick. So, Wroclaw, Gdansk, those were German cities. That's what it's showing. That's pretty interesting.

[00:03:32]And then Poland lost a lot of the eastern side of the country. That's really interesting. I had no idea.

[00:03:37]Germany for, well, centuries.

[00:03:40]You can see that in the names of the cities.

[00:03:42]Danzig becomes Gdansk. Breslau becomes Wroclaw. And Stettin becomes Poland has had their modern borders [sighs and laughter] for almost 80 years now. And that feels long, but when you look at history, that's just the blink of an eye. And this occupation by the Prussians, by the Russians, and Austro-Hungarians, it left its mark on the people. Not only then, but still nowadays. Wow.

[00:04:12]All right, this is where it's about to get juicy. I think he's about to get into the huge divide right here. He gave us the backstory. Let's get into the divide. Last October, Szymon Pitek tweeted this map thread.

[00:04:23]It's 2023, 109 years after World War I started, yet the pre-World War I imperial borders are still visible on the election map of Poland.

[00:04:33]This thread went viral. As someone who loves how history still influences the present, I had to go talk to him. I didn't really think too much about it, but then suddenly I saw the borders of the empires from before World War I. Szymon is a Polish map nerd living in San Francisco. Wow.

[00:04:53]>> He's been obsessed with these borders since he found a special map. Probably one of the first viral maps I had was a map of access to restrooms inside of someone's house. So, on this map he suddenly saw the borders, and it didn't stop there. And like since then, like I've been doing more and more up more and more maps, and then on a lot of them, these borders actually show up.

[00:05:17]We have the map of the recent election.

[00:05:19]It's quite clear that the progressive opposition won out in the western part of Poland. They also won out in the bigger cities. Places where people are generally more progressive. The conservative party won Okay, I think that's pretty normal.

[00:05:31]Pretty most places, I would say. I mean, the US is like this, too. The big cities are typically more progressive progressive than the small cities.

[00:05:40]more on the east. This is a rural region. And it's also a region that is doing not so well as the rest of Poland.

[00:05:47]Okay.

[00:05:47]>> some of the poorest provinces here. But why do these maps show the former imperial borders so well? Maybe not a lot of people realize, but a lot of many parts of western [music] Poland were kind of like the wild west only 75 years ago. A lot of this has to do with the end of the Second World War. Stalin keeps this part to the east, and Poland gained all that German land to the west.

[00:06:10]Mhm.

[00:06:10]>> Now, millions of people are forced from their homes, both Germans and Poles. Many Poles settle in this area. This former German lands. Huh. These Polish people, they not only lost their houses, they also lost their traditions, their communities, but also the social control of a place where you've been living for generations. And with less social control, you can do more what you want.

[00:06:35]And this makes people, well, less traditional. And the idea is that these migrants invested more in education. The theory is that people that are forced to migrate, they invest in things that are more easy to take with you.

[00:06:48]Interesting.

[00:06:50]>> on education in these families is still there this day. You can clearly see the difference in schooling results between those that were forced and those that weren't forced to migrate. Higher education is linked to more progressive views.

[00:07:03]Another reason why these lands are more progressive could be that [music] they just are closer to Germany.

[00:07:10]Wait, real quick. I got to back up. I am a bit shocked because if they moved all the way across Poland, I would expect there to be a lot more like mingling between the minds. Their views would mingle more, and so they would have more of a shared belief, but maybe when they came from the eastern side to the western side, they just brought all their views. That's what it sounds like.

[00:07:29]Germany is the biggest [music] economic power on the continent.

[00:07:33]It's much easier to trade with or work in Germany if you're close. Okay, fair enough.

[00:07:37]>> take a look at the European Union as a whole, the eastern part of Poland is literally at the edge of the EU, further away from economic options. Mhm.

[00:07:46]>> People that are more well-off tend to have more liberal views.

[00:07:50]And in addition, it could also be that eastern Poland is just more rural and older, which makes people more conservative.

[00:07:58]Mhm.

[00:07:59]Now, these are some explanations, but reality is complex. And there are more differences in the past that have an effect and still influence people's lives today.

[00:08:09]To start with, Okay. Here we go.

[00:08:11]>> the election map that the differences are visible.

[00:08:14]People in the east and west also have different jobs.

[00:08:17]Agriculture is pretty big in the east.

[00:08:19]Like there are still counties where like 40% of the people working in agriculture, which is almost unheard of in other developed countries.

[00:08:28]But the west of Poland is more focused on industrial and service sectors.

[00:08:32]But remember that Poland was divided around 1800. These years are kind of crucial because that's also when the Industrial Revolution started. When western economies started to industrialize in 18th century, Central Europe was like, we'll stick to farming, all right. And this led to differences in, for instance, the railway network.

[00:08:51]Take this map of the railways around 1900s, and you can see the divide.

[00:08:56]Oh, wow.

[00:08:57]>> as part of the Prussian Empire, industrialized way more rapidly than those eastern territories under Austro-Hungarian and Russian control.

[00:09:05]And So, it seems like from what this map's showing and what he's talking about, that the eastern side of Poland was kind of forgotten. It was still farmland, the people didn't want to industrialize, and so that's why it's shaped like that today.

[00:09:19]And this amount of industrialization just doesn't change in a generation or two.

[00:09:23]>> [music] >> But it's not just that.

[00:09:26]How people do agriculture is also different. You can see this from satellite imagery. The plots in the west are just much bigger.

[00:09:33]Farms are big companies here. They're producing for the market. But in the east, you find a lot more smaller plots.

[00:09:40]This is a super complicated thing with many explanations, but there are two things that I want to highlight here.

[00:09:47]Wow, okay.

[00:09:48]>> Part of the answer is that in the west, it was way more normal that the older son would get all the land. But in the east, especially in Austria-Hungary, farms could be more easily split up between the kids. So then you get all these much smaller plots.

[00:10:04]That is so complex. That is insanely complex. I would actually expect it to be the opposite, but that's really interesting actually. And it's also in the west where the most parts of the land were collectivized under the Soviet government. And for some reason that really didn't go through in the east.

[00:10:22]And now to those maps that made Simon go viral for the first time. Housing.

[00:10:27]These maps show when houses are built.

[00:10:30]In general, the west has older homes built before 1945. This is probably the case because these were German lands.

[00:10:37]And apart from the cities that got, well, leveled, the rest of the countryside just didn't get destroyed as much in the war. But in the east, where a lot more houses were built, building bathrooms inside houses were apparently not a big priority for the communist government. Now, That's so random. Like, okay, so what did they have? Like community bathrooms?

[00:10:58]I'm I'm I'm confused because I would imagine in today's society they would have those, right? Or am I just a little crazy?

[00:11:05]I have to say this is not the definitive explanation. Simon told me that it was also more normal for people to build a toilet outside of their house in these parts because they thought it was just less unclean, which, you know, I can imagine. But if you're a Polish person and you really know why this divide is there, let us know in the comments.

[00:11:26]I actually really want to know. I do like is the next one. In Polish language, there is not that many words that start with an A. So it means there almost no cities that start with an A.

[00:11:37]But if you look at the former Russian area, a different picture starts to emerge. Suddenly, you do find them.

[00:11:44]Dots on the map that represent cities with an A. So, where does this come from? It has to do with these guys, three tsars called Alexander.

[00:11:53]So I guess in these lands, if you make new village, This is blowing my mind right now.

[00:11:58]There's a lot of villages and cities in the eastern part of Poland that begin or have the letter A because of the Russian and Prussian tsars. That's actually incredibly fascinating. Did you know that or am I just learning that for the first time?

[00:12:12]New village, you know, just go for the tsar. It's probably the best idea.

[00:12:17]So, we have all these maps showing different ways in which Poland is divided. I do have to say that there are also a lot of markers in the modern time that show that these divisions are going away. For instance, if you look at primary school results. And because people are leaving the countryside for the cities, the old divide makes place for a new one, a divide between city and countryside.

[00:12:41]Of course.

[00:12:41]>> divide is something you see all over the world. But apart from that, I think one thing that this story shows is how much changed in the 20th century for Europe, but especially for Poland. I mean, >> [music] >> just look at the modern map of Poland.

[00:12:56]None of their current neighboring countries even existed 30 years ago.

[00:13:01]Wow.

[00:13:01]>> But even though borders can change very fast, there are things that change a lot slower. Things that still have an impact on the people in the present. Like what kind of infrastructure is built?

[00:13:13]Do you live close to a railway station?

[00:13:16]What is the economic situation of your region?

[00:13:19]Has your family always been into farming?

[00:13:21]In the west, we like to think of ourselves as individuals, individuals with free will and the capacity to make choices that impact our lives.

[00:13:30]But in so many big and small ways, we are the product of our environment.

[00:13:38]All right, insane video. I learned so much there. Some of those things were in really interesting. Some of them were random, like bathroom is outside the homes. That's just a weird different culture cultural thing, I guess. I would imagine that this looks a bit different in the modern times, kind of like he hinted to at the end. Maybe this is just a historical a map and accounts um dating back further, but from what he just showed us, that's really shocking.

[00:14:01]If you enjoyed the video, if you learned something, and if you want to see another video just like this, make sure to like and subscribe. I'm going to keep exploring Europe, keep exploring the cultures, the sports, and the people.

[00:14:12]So, if you want to join me, go ahead and subscribe, and I will see you in the next video. Cheers.