For Israelis and Jews, Poland’s decision to move against Volodymyr Zelensky’s Order of the White Eagle should not be read as a quarrel over old Polish grievances. It should be read as a warning about the price of historical amnesia. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army was not merely a controversial anti-Soviet force. Its legacy is inseparable from the massacre of Polish civilians in Volhynia and from the wider world of wartime nationalist collaboration that helped make the Holocaust possible. When Kyiv honors the “Heroes of the UPA,” it does not only wound Polish memory. It also insults Jewish memory.

On June 19, Polish President Karol Nawrocki moved to revoke Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Order of the White Eagle — Poland’s oldest and highest state distinction, established in 1705. Critics in Kyiv and beyond called it a betrayal of an ally at war. It was nothing of the sort. It was Poland refusing to let the memory of genocide be dressed up as military virtue.

The decision followed a choice made in Kyiv: Zelensky’s approval of naming a Ukrainian armed forces unit after the “Heroes of the UPA” — the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the armed wing of the Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. For many Ukrainians, the UPA is invoked as a symbol of anti-Soviet resistance. For Poles, the name first evokes something else: Volhynia.

Between 1943 and 1945, UPA units carried out a campaign to remove the Polish population from Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. Entire villages were erased. Polish historians estimate that as many as 100,000 Polish civilians — men, women, and........

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