In June 1941 German troops occupied Minsk. Yosif Levin, his parents, and his four siblings were made to move into a ghetto. Eleven-year-old Yosif and his father Isaak Levin had to perform forced labor.
In 1942, shortly after his parents’ murder, Yosif Levin sought protection with a partisan group in the forests around the village of Porechye (now Parechcha). As their liaison to the ghetto resistance, he made regular secret trips to the Minsk ghetto, where he also visited his younger sister Maya Levina.
In October 1943, when all the Jews still alive in the ghetto were to be deported, Yosif Levin smuggled his sister Maya and another forty orphaned children out of the ghetto. He took them to Porechye, where villagers took them in under protection of a partisan unit.
During a raid in the village in 1944, Yosif Levin and other villagers were arrested by German troops and taken to the German Reich as forced labor. He survived several concentration camps and returned to Minsk as a Red Army soldier in 1946.