Sadly, after the debacle at Warsaw in 1794, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was torn into three pieces by Russia, Prussia, and Austria and effectively ceased to exist for 123 years, until 1918 when it once again emerged to become a sovereign state in 1918. The world discovered then that while the country had had no borders and no name for all those years, the folkways, language, customs, beliefs, and faith had endured from generation to generation in the hearts and minds of Poland’s people. A nation is no stronger than her people and Poland rose in November of that year like a phoenix.