Kneeling, Standing
Can a nation kneel in repentance while being forced to stand in defense?
Written in Warsaw after returning from a volunteer aid convoy to Ukraine.
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 traveled into Warsaw by train from Kyiv, where I volunteered with the NAFO 69th Sniffing Brigade to deliver vehicles to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. It was their 55th convoy since the full-scale war began.
The news was ablaze with a political row: President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine had mailed the Order of the White Eagle back to Poland, the country’s highest honor. President Karol Nawrocki had moved to strip him of it after Zelensky named a new military unit, “Heroes of the UPA”. The UPA refers to the controversial Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a symbol of resistance for many Ukrainians and a symbol of Nazi collaboration for many Poles.
As for me, I was born in 1991 in Volodymyr-Volynskyi, since shortened to Volodymyr, one of the oldest towns in Ukraine, in the region of Volhynia, also shortened to Volyn. The same Volhynia where the UPA massacred up to 100,000 Poles.
Following the collapse of the USSR, when I was just 9 months old, my family moved to the United States, and we became Ukrainian Americans. My ancestry, according to DNA matching, is 53% Ukrainian and 34% Polish.
It feels a bit like my parents arguing again.
On December 7th 1970, 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, where the German state attempted the systematic annihilation of Europe’s Jews. Brandt’s visit occurred 25 years after the end of WWII, 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 defense?
Before the full-scale invasion, Ukraine had made real reconciliation efforts. Monuments were built, presidents knelt and laid wreaths. War disturbed that momentum and forced Ukraine to reach for symbols that say, “we did not surrender”. And yet the deeper work did not stop. 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 to weigh a movement that fought for independence and slaughtered its Polish neighbors in the same years, and what that memory should demand of the present. Ukraine does not formally deny the killings. It defers the argument over their meaning to peacetime. When Zelensky returned the medal, he noted that Poland had never stripped the same honor from Catherine II, who partitioned Poland out of existence, or from Mussolini. 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 just as fully.
Today, behind the monument, the museum’s flag stood, and beside it the flags of Poland and Ukraine.