When I dig into history, it often feels like I’m walking among ruins. Not just the crumbled stones of ancient walls, but the broken stories of families and communities who lived, loved, and lost.

Nearly three years ago, I solidified our Mull Family branches on my mother’s side of the family. Today, I am wearing a Polish pride t-shirt and pondering how 3 million Polish Jews were eradicated from the earth.

I am imagining the stories of my Polish brothers and sisters — the Jewish communities of Poland, who once numbered in the millions. Before World War II, Poland was the beating heart of Jewish life, filled with prayer, scholarship, and song. By the end of the Holocaust, ninety percent of them were gone. Entire towns, entire families, erased. Historical data says 3.3 million Jews were in Poland and then only 300 K survived.

It was intentional to place all the gas chambers in Poland. It breaks my heart as if it were yesterday.

As I think of my own great-grandmother, who left Poland before the war, I can’t help but wonder. Did she leave behind cousins, neighbors, friends who never made it out? Were some of the voices that vanished ones she once knew?

History books can give us numbers, but ruins whisper questions. And as I search, I feel a kind of responsibility — to remember those lives, to hold space for the silenced, and to remind myself that every statistic was once a story.

The Bible says, “Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations” (Isaiah 58:12). When I read those words, I think of how even out of destruction, memory itself can be a kind of rebuilding.

Today, when I look at the ruins of history, I see more than tragedy. I see an invitation to honor, to remember, and to keep alive the stories that were almost lost — stories that might be woven into my own family’s journey.