Kneeling, standing

As I approached the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw, the weeds between the cobblestone resembled the stinkweed that plagues my Arizona backyard. Yet, my nose detected nothing unusual here. Perhaps my senses were dulled. I had just travelled into Warsaw by train from Kyiv, where I volunteered with Help99’s NAFO 69th Sniffing Brigade to deliver vehicles to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. It was their 55th convoy since the full-scale war had begun.

The news was ablaze with a political row: Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had sent his Order of the White Eagle medal, the country’s highest honour, back to Poland. Poland’s President Karol Nawrocki had moved to strip him of it after Zelenskyy gave a special forces unit the honorary name “Heroes of the UPA”. The abbreviation UPA refers to the controversial Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a symbol of resistance for many Ukrainians. At the same time, it is also a symbol of the mass killings and ethnic cleansing of Polish civilians in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia during the Second World War.

I was born in 1991 in Volodymyr-Volynskyy, one of Ukraine’s oldest towns, in the region of Volhynia – now shortened in official usage to Volodymyr and Volyn. This is the same Volhynia, and Eastern Galicia, where the UPA massacred up to 100,000 Poles.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, when I was just nine months old, my family moved to the United States, and we became Ukrainian-Americans. My ancestry, according to DNA matching, is 53 per cent Ukrainian and 34 per cent Polish. It feels a bit like my parents arguing again.

On December 7th 1970, the West German Chancellor Willy Brandt famously knelt at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, a moment that crystallized 25 years of rebuilding and marked a new chapter for German-Polish relations.

Could Ukrainians and Poles do the same? I wondered.

The monument featured many small stones at its base. This is a Jewish custom of remembrance: a flower wilts and fades, but a stone remains. The gesture emphasizes the weight of the Holocaust’s history, when the German state attempted to systematically annihilate Europe’s Jews. Brandt’s visit occurred 25 years after the end of the Second World War, a full generation later, from a western-aligned, sovereign, and prosperous Germany.

Today it seems everyone wants Ukraine to produce its Brandt moment. Poland’s president has tied it to EU membership; the rest of us, diaspora included, simply find the waiting uncomfortable.

But Brandt knelt because no one told him to. The power of the gesture was that it was both unprompted and politically costly. A repentance produced on demand is not the same act.

And yet, present-day Ukraine faces its generational enemy in an existential struggle for survival and independence. The work of reconciliation between Ukraine and Poland has been deferred, perhaps naturally, in the face of death.

Can a nation kneel in repentance while being forced to stand in defence?

Before the full-scale invasion, Ukraine had made real reconciliation efforts. In 1997, presidents Leonid Kuchma and Aleksander Kwaśniewski met in Kyiv and signed a joint declaration of concord and reconciliation. Four years later, on Ukrainian soil, Pope John Paul II delivered a formula, "we forgive and ask for forgiveness." In Lviv, the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church asked for forgiveness in turn. In 2003, on the 60th anniversary of the Volhynia massacre, the two presidents stood together at Pavlivka, formerly Poryck, and unveiled a monument on the ground where the killing had taken place.

In time, both sides would begin to harden in their approach. By 2016, the Polish Parliament (Sejm) declared the killings a genocide and established July 11th as a day of remembrance; Kyiv responded with a resolution of its own, and both sides dug in. A year later, after Poles tore down a Ukrainian Insurgent Army monument in Hruszowice, a village in eastern Poland, Ukraine retaliated by freezing every exhumation of Polish graves on its soil.

However ugly the process had become, Russia’s full-scale invasion forced Ukraine to reach for symbols of defiance – “we did not surrender”. And yet despite the war, Ukraine still reached for reconciliation. Exhumations of Polish victims, frozen since 2017, resumed in 2025, and 42 of the dead were exhumed at Puzhnyky and reburied with both countries’ culture ministers present.

What is not in dispute is the horror. The massacre was systematic, and most of its victims were women and children. What remains contested is everything after: how should we understand a movement that fought for independence but slaughtered its Polish neighbours at the same time?

Ukraine does not formally deny the killings. It defers the argument over the UPA’s significance to peacetime. But the thing demanded is smaller: to condemn the names of the men who carried out the atrocities, not the whole group. It needs no ceasefire and it could be done tomorrow, which is why the war is not the reason for a lack of action. Brandt knelt because no one made him. To demand the same of Ukraine, the side being invaded, is to ask for repentance on command that means nothing.

When Zelenskyy returned the medal, he noted that Poland had never stripped the same honour from the Russian Empress Catherine II, who partitioned Poland out of existence; from the father of fascism, Benito Mussolini; or from the Putin-connected German politician Gerhard Schröder. The order has survived more questionable company than a Ukrainian president fighting for his country’s life.

A people who can stand this fiercely, I suspect, will be able to kneel in reconciliation just as fully. Today, behind the monument, the museum's flag stood, and beside it the flags of Poland and Ukraine.

Written in Warsaw after returning from a volunteer aid convoy to Ukraine.

Arthur Nemirovskiy was born in Volodymyr, Ukraine and raised in the United States. He is a volunteer with Cactus and Tryzub – a grassroots volunteer initiative based in Arizona, supporting Ukraine’s struggle for freedom, sovereignty, and dignity.