With Germany's collapse and the Armistice signed the same day, the Regency Council transferred military authority to Józef Piłsudski, who had just returned from imprisonment in Magdeburg. Poland, partitioned out of existence by Russia, Prussia, and Austria in the late 18th century, re-emerged as an independent republic. November 11 has been celebrated as Poland's National Independence Day since.
For 123 years Poland existed only as a memory, a language, and a cause—divided among three empires that had each, at different points, tried to stamp out Polish identity through bans on the language, deportations, and Russification or Germanization campaigns. Generations of Poles fought in failed uprisings, most bloodily in 1830 and 1863.
The collapse of all three partitioning powers simultaneously at the end of World War I created a once-in-a-century vacuum. Piłsudski, a former revolutionary and socialist who had organized Polish Legions to fight alongside Austria-Hungary against Russia, arrived in Warsaw by train from German captivity on November 10. The next day, the Regency Council dissolved itself and handed him supreme military command.
The borders of the new Poland were far from settled—wars with Ukraine, Soviet Russia, and Lithuania would follow within months—but the symbolic moment of rebirth was fixed. Communist authorities later suppressed public celebration of the date, wary of its nationalist resonance; only after 1989 did November 11 return as an official holiday, marked today by both solemn ceremony and, less happily, marches by far-right groups that have drawn international attention.