Huta Deregowska and Zarzecze

Roadside remembrance along our route

It's a good thing we had a GPS in our car; on our own, we would never have found these two tiny villages of my grandparents.  We started out from Warsaw and quickly began to drive through little villages with people clearing land by horse and plow and weeding great rows of vegetables and grains with hand-held hoes.  Very hard work. We passed many roadside remembrances, some very small and simple and some very ornate. The land was at first very flat; then we began to see undulating hills, all the while remaining bright hues of green.  Every once in a while, a small river snaked its way through the waving grain, then the wider Vistula River came into view and ran under our road. 

Cereal grains waving in the breeze

Maybe Dziadzi's house?

At last we got to the first village, Huta Deregowska, where my grandfather was born.  It didn't take long to drive through; it consisted of only about 40 houses all situated on the main street.  Some were pretty modern and some looked as though they had been there for at least a century. 


Try as we did, we could not get anybody to speak English to us, although one young man said, "Sorry."  That raised some suspicion that more people could speak English than would admit.  One elderly lady came out to her fence to look at us but shrugged when we asked her if she could speak English.  I said, "Thank you" to her in Polish, and she laughed and responded with something that I could only think must have been, "I didn't do anything for you."  We saw several very early houses that we imagined was what my grandparents must have lived in, and we found the very early churches in both villages.  We agreed that these definitely were old enough to have been their home town churches.  We later met a woman at a gas station who had lived in the US for 7 years.  She explained

church in Huta Deregowska

church in Zarzezce

that sometimes people would return to Poland to claim land that had belonged to their ancestors.  Hence, the general suspicion of foreigners. 

We drove the 1 1/2 miles to Zarzecze where my grandmother was born and came upon an old cemetery.  We stopped the car, got out and began to wander through it.  In a few minutes Terry called out that he had found something.  When we got there, we saw a Nalepa grave, then another and another.  There must have been at least 15-20 in all, some from Nalepas born in the early 20th century and some born later.  There was a section of very, very old unmarked graves like the kind that people who had died in the 19th century would have had.  We spent over an hour just looking at different tombstones, then we picked up a small remembrance to put on my dad's grave, and left since the afternoon was almost over and we still had miles to go before we could sleep.