November 2012: Mariya Soroka uproots an old alder tree in her garden in Velyki Krushlyntsi, Vinnytsia Oblast. She finds a bottle filled with millet.
Her grandfather, Semen Poberezhniak, buried it in 1932. Soviet confiscation crews were sweeping the village, seizing all stored food. He hid the grain to plant in the spring.
Spring 1933: He couldn’t find it. He had forgotten to mark the tree.
His eldest daughter, Yustyna, and her three children starved to death that year.
For 23 years until his death in 1956, Poberezhniak blamed himself. The grain that could have saved them lay buried beneath the alder.
Eighty years later, the bottle surfaced when the tree came down.
It now sits in the Museum of Local History in Vinnytsia—a small bottle of millet that documents one family’s desperate attempt to survive the Holodomor, and the price of Stalin’s engineered famine.