Kliasun mentions that the search brigade activists, whom he calls “inhumane” (neliudy) threw people out of their houses and left “half” of the people in the village so destitute that they died of starvation. He lists names of 32 people from the village, including what looks like entire families of Omelchenko and Sheka, who died of starvation. Among the names in the list is also Vasyl Fedotovych Kliasun, likely Hryhorii Kliasun’s brother.

There were also people who died in the village while they were passing by. They were buried wherever they died. Kliasun remembers a woman with a little girl who was begging for some food. The next morning, she was found dead outside a fence, and no one knew what happened to the child.

Kliasun mentions that during the Holodomor, the activists dragged the elderly priest Martyriev Hryhorii Vasyliovych out of his house by his hair and tormented him, so that he died as a result. His wife died of starvation.

After the Holodomor, in 1937, people were snatched by the “black raven” (i.e. political police, NKVD) from their workplaces and their beds in the middle of the night. Kliasun names the seven people from Sverdlovka who were taken. One person returned in 1947, three died (while in prison), and the fate of four more is unknown.

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Hryhorii Kliasun witnessed the events of the Holodomor in the village of Sverdlovka, Novhorod-Siversky raion, Chernihiv oblast (currently Desnianske, Novhorod-Siversky raion, Chernihiv oblast). It is unclear how old he was in 1932-1933. He is “a group I disabled veteran of the Great Patriotic War”, i.e. a WWII invalid and veteran.

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