Shared flats

After the war, Poznań struggled with a terrible housing crisis. Top-down management of flats was supposed to help cope with the situation. Housing committees were established. They determined the amount of space to be allotted to a person or a family. Past owners of the properties had no right to manage their own property freely. The so-called shared flats were introduced. Sometimes people accommodated in them reached an agreement and coexisted peacefully. Often, however, sharing a flat caused various problems and led to conflicts.

We were given the flat in Sienkiewicza Street in 1946. My uncle Weber made it happen (…). [It was] a modern pre-war apartment: three bedrooms, 25 metres each, a small 10-metre room for the help, a large hallway, kitchen and bathroom. 120 metres in total! Of course, we were not alone there. One of the rooms had already been occupied by a family of four, the other – a beautifully furnished master bedroom – by two students. We were a family of five: my Grandma, my parents, me and my brother. We were given one large and one small room.

Kowalski, Jacek. 2014. The Kowalski Family’s furniture. Poznań: 84-85.

A two-bedroom flat and a shared kitchen. Mrs Swornowska lived there with her daughter. We enjoyed living there (…) we had no conflicts. The lavatories were at the landing (…)

Urbaś, Henryk. 2018, in: Anna Pikuła (ed.) It should be said. From the Śródka Community Archive. Vol. 2. Poznań: 116.

We were allocated a place in a three-bedroom flat with another family. That’s how they squished [people] together. [We lived] with another family in a one-room apartment without the right to use the kitchen and the bathroom, only the lavatories were available for us actually. So for twenty-odd years my mother cooked dinners on an electric cooker. (…) In any case, these people were really unpleasant. They didn’t let us use the kitchen… Perhaps for the best. We cooked dinners and all we needed for eating on this one-ring cooker. We went to bathe in a bathhouse in Słowackiego Street, which opened there. So the conditions after the war were also very difficult. Life went on.

Excerpt from Bogumił Moenke’s account recorded in 2009 by Grzegorz Kaczorowski. The account (file no. AHM_1384) comes from the collection of the Oral History Archive of KARTA Centre Foundation.

„Głos Wielkopolski” 1945, number 187, from the collection of PAN Kórnicka Library

Complaint by Janina Skowrońska about breaking construction regulations by her neighbour, Joachim Silaski, who was building an annex with a kitchen and toilets adjacent to a restaurant at 57 Marszałka Focha Street, 1948, from the collection of Poznań City Hall’s Department of Urban Planning and Architecture, cyryl.poznan.pl

Staff shortages

After the war, the entire Poznań Voivodship suffered from the shortage of teachers. Only some of the pre-war pedagogues returned to work. In response to the crisis, in the summer of 1945 the first courses for future teachers opened, which allowed participants to complement their education fairly quickly, prepared them for the work in the teaching profession and enabled to receive the necessary qualifications.

„Głos Wielkopolski” 1945, number 122, from the collection of PAN Kórnicka Library