Poland marks independence on 11 November because on that day in 1918, as the Armistice ended the fighting in the West, the Regency Council in Warsaw handed military command to Józef Piłsudski, back from German captivity the day before. A 1937 law made the date a state holiday; abolished in 1945, it was restored in 1989.
Every year on 11 November Poland celebrates its National Independence Day, a public holiday and a day off work. Abroad the same date is the anniversary of the Armistice that ended the fighting of World War I, and the coincidence is not an accident.1
Yet Poland did not become independent on a single day. The new state took shape over one crowded week, from 7 to 14 November 1918, and the date in the middle of it became a symbol only later. Here is what happened, why 11 November was chosen, and how the holiday was lost under communism and won back in 1989, told from the documents of the time.
Poland before November 1918
When World War I began there had been no Polish state for more than a century. The lands of the old Commonwealth were divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria, and a Library of Congress study counts 123 years in which Poland was absent from the map of Europe. The war set the three partitioning powers against one another, and the Polish question became an international one.2
On 5 November 1916 the emperors of Germany and Austria-Hungary proclaimed a Kingdom of Poland under their protection. It was a dependent creation, with real power left in German and Austrian hands. In 1917 the occupiers set up a Regency Council in Warsaw: Archbishop Aleksander Kakowski, Prince Zdzisław Lubomirski and Count Józef Ostrowski.3
Józef Piłsudski, who had commanded the First Brigade of the Polish Legions, broke with the Central Powers in the summer of 1917. In the so-called oath crisis most soldiers of the First and Third Brigades refused to swear loyalty to the rulers of the Central Powers, and the Germans imprisoned Piłsudski in the fortress of Magdeburg.4
October 1918: the empires give way
By the autumn of 1918 the Central Powers were losing the war. On 7 October the Regency Council, until then dependent on the occupiers, issued a proclamation "To the Polish Nation". Citing the peace principles of the President of the United States, it called for an independent state embracing all Polish lands, with access to the sea, and promised a government drawn from the broadest sections of the nation. On 12 October it decreed a new oath for the Polish Army, by which the troops passed under its supreme authority.5
Polish authorities were springing up across the collapsing empires. On 28 October Polish deputies to the Austrian parliament created the Polish Liquidation Commission in Kraków, which claimed authority over Galicia.6
Further east the Ukrainian National Rada had proclaimed a Ukrainian state, and on the night of 31 October to 1 November Ukrainian soldiers seized the key buildings of Lwów (Lviv). The city's Polish residents took up arms. The fighting for Lwów opened the Polish-Ukrainian war ten days before the date Poland now celebrates.7
7 November: a people's government in Lublin
In the night of 6 to 7 November, in Lublin, taken over by Poles a few days earlier, the Provisional People's Government of the Polish Republic was proclaimed. At its head stood Ignacy Daszyński, leader of the Galician socialists.8
The historian Włodzimierz Suleja argues that the Lublin government effectively settled the form of the new state: Poland would return as a republic. Its reach, in his account, did not extend even to the area around Lublin, and its support came mainly from the socialist and peasant left. Norman Davies adds that its leaders could not fairly claim to represent the nation as a whole.9
10 November: Piłsudski comes home
Germany was in revolution. Councils of workers and soldiers had taken power in town after town, and the new German authorities released Piłsudski from Magdeburg.10
He reached Warsaw by train from Berlin at 7:30 on the morning of 10 November. The Warsaw daily Kurjer Warszawski reported the next day that he was met at the station by the command of the Polish Military Organization (POW) and by Prince Zdzisław Lubomirski for the Regency Council.11
The welcome at the station was smaller than legend has it. The well-known photograph of Piłsudski greeted by crowds at a Warsaw station was taken on 12 December 1916, not in November 1918, as historians of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) have pointed out. Later in the day, though, crowds gathered outside the house on Moniuszko Street where he stayed, and he spoke to them from the balcony.12
Talks with the regents began at once. That evening the Lublin government telegraphed that it placed itself at his disposal without reservation, and Piłsudski gave up a planned journey to Lublin.13
Disarming the Germans in Warsaw
On the evening of 10 November Warsaw began to disarm its German garrison. Members of the POW, soldiers of the Polska Siła Zbrojna, the Regency Council's army, and groups of young people took weapons from German soldiers and occupied strategic buildings. The Kurjer Warszawski reported young people disarming German officers and soldiers near the Vienna railway station late that evening, and shots fired in the confusion.14
According to the Museum of Polish History the disarming went on mostly without a fight, though there were sharp clashes, among them at the city hall and the Citadel. On the morning of 11 November the Citadel, the fortress above the Vistula, passed to a Polish battalion, and Polish officials began taking over German offices across the city.15
Piłsudski moved at once to get the occupation troops out without a war. Already on 10 November he met the German soldiers' council, and the two sides agreed that the German units would be evacuated home.16
11 November: command passes to Piłsudski
On 11 November the Regency Council issued a short proclamation "To the Polish Nation". "In view of the threatening external and internal danger," it read, "to unify all military orders and to maintain order in the country, the Regency Council hands over military authority and supreme command of the Polish troops under its control to Brigadier Józef Piłsudski."17
The document also recorded a promise. Once a national government was formed, the regents would hand it supreme state authority, and Piłsudski undertook to hand that government his military power, "which is part of supreme state authority". He signed below Kakowski, Lubomirski and Ostrowski to confirm it.18
That same morning, in a railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne north of Paris, the German delegate Matthias Erzberger and Marshal Ferdinand Foch had signed the Armistice. At 11 a.m. it came into force and the fighting on the Western Front stopped.19
The handover itself was a short act. It gave Piłsudski an army, not yet a state, while the city was still being cleared of German troops. The date became the symbol of regained independence afterward, in the way the nation chose to remember the whole week. M. B. B. Biskupski, the American historian who wrote a history of the holiday, calls 11 November a curious anniversary whose commemoration was only intermittently observed in the century that followed.20
14 November: from army to state
Three days later the regents went further. On 14 November they wrote that the transitional division of supreme authority could not last without harm to the emerging Polish state, dissolved the Regency Council, and placed "our duties and responsibility toward the Polish nation" in Piłsudski's hands, to be passed on to a national government.21
The same day Piłsudski announced that he had chosen Ignacy Daszyński to head the cabinet. The attempt failed, chiefly because the right, above all the National Democrats, opposed it. On 18 November another socialist, Jędrzej Moraczewski, formed the government instead.22
On 22 November Piłsudski signed, with Moraczewski's countersignature, the decree on the supreme representative authority of the Polish Republic. It made him Provisional Chief of State until a constituent Sejm met, with ministers appointed by him and answerable to him. A decree of 28 November called general elections for 26 January 1919.23
Why 11 November and not another date?
Several dates could have become the holiday. Artur Kuprianis, a historian at the IPN, has counted about fifteen proposals, among them 5 November, the anniversary of the 1916 act; 6 to 7 November, the Lublin government; and 16 November, when Piłsudski notified the Allied powers that the Polish state had been reborn.24
In his account the National Democrats, the camp of Roman Dmowski, were the first to promote 11 November, the day the war won by the Allies they had backed came to an end. The Piłsudski camp tied the date firmly to Piłsudski only after it took power in 1926. The army marked the anniversary from 1919; in 1926 Piłsudski made it a day off for the state administration, and in the 1930s for schools.25
Przemysław Waingertner of the University of Łódź argues that 11 November is symbolically the best date of all: it was the day World War I ended, the war out of which Poland was reborn, and the day on which one side of that war accepted defeat.26
The law came in 1937, two years after Piłsudski's death. The Act of 23 April 1937 declared 11 November, "as the anniversary of the Polish Nation's recovery of independent statehood and as a day forever bound to the great name of Józef Piłsudski, the victorious Leader of the Nation in the struggle for the freedom of the Fatherland", a solemn Independence Holiday and a day off work. As a statutory holiday it was kept only twice, in 1937 and 1938, before war came in 1939.27
Abolished in 1945, restored in 1989
After World War II the communist authorities replaced it. The Act of 22 July 1945 made 22 July, the anniversary of the manifesto of the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN), the National Day of Poland's Rebirth, and repealed the 1937 law.28
The date survived in people's memory. On 11 November 1978, the sixtieth anniversary, opposition activists held an independent commemoration in Warsaw, and in the years that followed organizers of such gatherings were arrested and punished.29
On 15 February 1989 the Sejm restored the holiday. "To commemorate the anniversary of the Polish Nation's recovery of independent statehood and the struggles of generations of Poles for freedom and independence," the act declared 11 November the solemn National Independence Day and a day off work. According to the Museum of Polish History, the communist authorities meant it as a gesture toward the opposition, which was then entering the Round Table talks.30
For a year Poland had two national days of independence on its calendar, and 1989 was the only year in which both were officially observed. An act of 6 April 1990 abolished the 22 July holiday.31
How Poland marks 11 November today
11 November remains a solemn national holiday and a day off work under the act of 15 February 1989, which dedicated it to the anniversary of the recovery of independent statehood and to the struggles of generations of Poles for freedom and independence.32
The link with Armistice Day
The overlap with the Western calendar is real. The fighting of World War I on the Western Front stopped at 11 a.m. on 11 November 1918, which is why the United States, which first kept the date as Armistice Day, now keeps it as Veterans Day, and why the same morning is remembered across Europe.33
For Kuprianis, the Polish holiday grew naturally out of the Western commemoration of the end of the war, and it suits Polish experience: Poles fought on many fronts, in different armies and on opposite sides, so the date remembers all of them.34
For the American side of the date, read Veterans Day: what 11 November marks, and for the last hours of the war in the West, how World War I ended.
Independence was a beginning
The week of 7 to 14 November neither began nor finished the building of the Polish state. It opened the struggle for its borders. The fight for Lwów was already under way, and ahead lay the war with Soviet Russia, decided by Piłsudski's victory at the Battle of Warsaw in August 1920.35
The story of those wars is told in the Polish-Soviet War, 1919 to 1921, and in our guide to the battles that won Polish independence, from the Legions to the Niemen.
