January 1943 was a difficult month for the Gestapo in the town of Pruzhany. The Germans were preparing to liquidate the ghetto any day, whose leadership constantly sabotaged their orders. To make matters worse, an “inside man” from the ghetto reported that a mechanic repairing Nazi equipment had ties to forest partisans. That same day, he was arrested by the Jewish police.

The arrested mechanic, Leib Meister, was interrogated for several days, but he continued to be stubborn. Meister screamed under the lashes of the whip and the blows of rifle ramrods, insisting that he had honestly worked for the great Reich and had not plotted anything against the Germans. "Let's just get rid of him, why bother with him!" – one of the investigators was thoroughly tired of the Jew's denials. The second immediately waved his hands: "Do you have another auto mechanic!? This is a useful Jew, let him work for now, they don't have long to live anyway."

Though he had never studied German, the beaten Leib Meister, lying on the floor, understood it well.He needed to hold on: not for himself, but for his comrades. To survive and definitely avenge the Nazis for the blood of his Jewish "brothers and sisters." The Gestapo officers resumed the torture, but they couldn't get anything from the Pruzhany ghetto inhabitant. He was released and continued the fight.

Leib Meister was born on May 12, 1912, in the town of Shereshevo, located right at the edge of the famous Białowieża Forest. His father, Solomon Meister, was a poor "kravets" (tailor), who traveled to villages and made sheepskin coats for peasants on order. His mother, Khaiba Abramovna Pitlevnik, on the contrary, came from a prominent Hasidic family that never lacked money. Khaiba's family had disowned her when they learned that the girl had decided to marry a poor man. Khaiba was adamant and married Solomon anyway, but their marriage was destined to be short-lived.

In 1918, when Leib was six years old, his father died of typhus. His mother, still quite young, remarried Yankel Ruzhansky from the village of Linovo. Khaiba took her daughters, Khava and Liba, to her new family, while sending her only son to a yeshiva. In those days, yeshivas served not only as religious educational institutions but also as a kind of orphanage.

Life in the yeshiva was not easy for Leib. Life in the newly independent Poland, to which the Pruzhany region now belonged, was difficult and tuberculosis was rampant in the yeshiva. Nevertheless, the attitude of the educators toward the children was very humane, and the Jewish community helped them a lot. Noticing over time that Leibush had a great talent – he was constantly making something – his guardians sent him to Pinsk. In the Polesie capital, Meister enrolled in a vocational school in Pinsk and graduated at 16 with a mechanic’s diploma. He rarely saw his mother and sisters, so immediately after graduating, he returned to the yeshiva.
They welcomed him like family but explained they could no longer accommodate him. Leib was given a set of bed linens and sent off with blessings into adult life. As a good specialist, the young man quickly found work in Pruzhany at a branch of a Warsaw firm that serviced water supply and sewage systems. After working for several years, Leib Solomonovich was drafted into the Polish army. He served in Warsaw itself, and afterward returned to Pruzhany.

Like many young Jews, Leib Meister tried to emigrate to Mandatory Palestine. But the exit certificate was expensive and out of reach for most. Meister was unsuccessful. He remained in Poland and continued to work in his profession.

On September 19, 1939, units of the Red Army entered Pruzhany. In Western Belarus, private property was almost immediately abolished, but work for Leib Solomonovich was found even under the new order. He began working as a civilian mechanic in the aircraft workshop of the 33rd Fighter Aviation Regiment of the Red Army. The regiment was based at the Kuplin airfield near Pruzhany. Right before the war, Leib Solomonovich got married. He and Anya had a little boy named Yasha.

No one in Pruzhany expected the war to start so soon. On June 22, 1941, Osoaviakhim exercises were planned at the regiment's base. Therefore, when Leib Meister woke up early in the morning to the sound of explosions, he wasn't surprised. But these were not exercises, but a real bombardment of the city and the sounds of real, not demonstrative, air battles. He rushed to the airfield, which was being attacked by 20 Heinkels operating under the cover of a group of ME-109 Messerschmitts.
Under constant fire, Leib Solomonovich and his comrades managed to prepare several aircraft for takeoff. The pilots who took to the sky engaged in battle, managing to disrupt the enemy's combat formations and shoot down 5 enemy aircraft. Senior Lieutenant Stepan Gudimov, the deputy commander of the aviation squadron, also boldly attacked the enemy. He destroyed one of the German aircraft with a ramming strike at the cost of his own life.

This bold resistance was a miracle. A few weeks before the war began, Meister and other mechanics at the base received an unexpected order – to disassemble the aircraft. Such an order in such unsettled times sounded more than strange, but they had to obey. Only a few machines took to battle on June 22, 1941, including Gudimov's aircraft.

Pruzhany was captured by German troops on June 23, 1941. Immediately after the occupation, the Germans began conducting "actions," shooting local Jews in the Slabudka tract near Pruzhany. In the first days of the occupation, 18 Jews were captured and shot based on tips from local criminals and collaborators.

On July 15, under the threat of executing 100 hostages, the occupiers demanded the creation of a Judenrat of 24 people, but they did not approve the list of people with higher education proposed by the community. A week later, the authorities formed a Judenrat of 5 craftsmen. Later, its number was increased to 24 people, with Itzhak Yanovich becoming the chairman.

On October 20, 1941, the Germans drove the Pruzhany Jews into a ghetto. The entire center of Pruzhany was behind barbed wire – Kobrinskaya Street, Freedom Street, Lenin Street, Kirov Street, Ostrovsky Street, Tormasov Street. Hundreds of people were brought from Shereshevo, Brest, and Bialystok. Jews were forced to move into houses in the ghetto territory, where two or three families lived together. Most of the population was driven to forced labor, but this was not the worst. It was much worse to be left without means of subsistence and die of hunger. Or to get on the Germans' bad side.

In July 1942, a tragic fate befell Leib Solomonovich's mother, his stepfather, and his sisters Khava and Liba. They were either brutally killed by the Germans near the oil depot at the Oranchitsy station or deported to Auschwitz.

Leib's family survived the pogroms of 1942 only thanks to his golden hands. But after the death of his mother, stepfather, and sisters, he could not simply observe the violence and seriously thought about revenge against the Nazis. Soon, such an opportunity appeared.

One Pruzhany baker, Alter Fayvushinsky, had the authority in the Judenrat to issue passes for work in the garage, so he became a member of the Judenrat responsible for work assignments. While working there, Leib Solomonovich stumbled upon a nearby warehouse with ammunition and malfunctioning rifles. Meister and 16 other men began to gather in one of the Jewish houses to brainstorm what to do next. The Jews decided to collect the discovered weapons and ammunition for underground resistance. They decided to hide it in an empty dugout near the bathhouse where Leib Solomonovich was living with his family at the time.

The underground members shared their plans with Alter Fayvushinsky, who immediately approved their idea. From then on, Leib Meister and his comrades went to work exclusively in the garage. Everywhere – at work, on the street – they observed strict secrecy. Every day, Meister took a blowtorch with him to work. Choosing a moment when no one was around, he would run into the warehouse and insert bullets into the opening of the blowtorch. The bullets fit so tightly that they could only be removed later with pliers. They carried rifles under their jackets, securing them with their trouser belts, sometimes disassembling them into parts. Each of the 15 acquired rifles had to be repaired and lubricated by Leib Meister at night.

Subsequently, the underground managed to establish smuggling of weapons into the ghetto. Leib repaired all these weapons. Most of them were damaged rifles and pistols found at the sites of battles from 1941. To make them operational, he had to not only restore damaged parts but also manufacture new ones. Even from intact parts of completely different weapons, Meister managed to assemble homemade models that were no worse than factory-made ones. For this, he was nicknamed "The Sorcerer" in the underground.

One of Leib Solomonovich's comrades learned that Natalia Chaikovskaya, who lived near the garage, was a partisan messenger. At the Jews' request, Natalia contacted the partisans and delivered their response to the ghetto: "Weapons are desperately needed in the forest!" The underground members perceived this as an order and their first assignment from the partisans. There was hope that they would help the ghetto inhabitants escape to the forest. However, soon the Jews received an order from partisan Ilyashuk, who visited the messenger Chaikovskaya – not to go to the forest. There was nothing to be done. Leib Meister and his comrades continued to stockpile ammunition for the stolen rifles, hoping to someday break free.

Often, the Germans would drag Leib Solomonovich to repair their broken cars. The underground operative would fix the equipment quickly but managed to secretly under-tighten the steering wheel or tamper with the brakes. He had to plan the sabotage very skillfully so that the accident wouldn't happen immediately after the repair. But how great was his joy when, a couple of weeks later, he would learn that a truck or car he had worked on had crashed into a tree somewhere or stalled during an anti-partisan operation.

Suddenly, permission came from the partisans to bring people to the forest. Meister himself couldn't leave because of his small children and wife, but he gladly prepared the young men. Usually, the underground members would leave in groups of three along Shereshevo Street, the quietest in the ghetto. Choosing a moment when the patrol split in different directions, people would cut the wire with pliers and quietly move through dark alleys to the outskirts of the city to make their way to the forest. By early 1943, eighteen people had been transferred from the Pruzhany ghetto. They were armed with rifles assembled by Leib Solomonovich.

Friends warned him to be more careful because he always smelled of gunpowder. But caution didn't help. In late January 1943, Meister was arrested by the police on suspicion of connections with partisans. He was reported by a neighbor who believed that any resistance attempts put the entire ghetto population at risk. As if the Germans needed any reason to kill Jews…

Walking back from his work at the garage, Leib Solomonovich spotted policemen approaching him from a distance. Realizing they were coming for him, he took out a rifle from under his jacket and threw it into a deep well. The police noticed this but couldn't retrieve the weapon from the well. They had nothing to charge Meister with, and the Nazis never got a confession from him.

After being released from prison in late January 1943, Leib Solomonovich rushed home immediately. However, neither his wife Anya, nor three-year-old Yasha, nor one-and-a-half-year-old Sonya, who was born during the occupation, were in the house. People said the Germans had taken them away in an unknown direction and shot them somewhere.

It was urgent to leave Pruzhany. From overheard conversations among Gestapo officers, it became clear that the Pruzhany ghetto was living its last days. Leib Meister contacted Alexander Ostapchuk, one of the leaders of the anti-fascist committee in the Pruzhany district, who reached out to the partisans at his request. The underground members were vetted, and permission to leave the ghetto was granted. The Germans often sent provocateurs or plants into the ghetto, so everyone was checked.

On the night of February 1-2, 1943, Leib Meister left with five other underground members via Shereshevo Street, where the wire had already been cut. The moon was shining brighter than ever, but the Jews carrying weapons to the partisan unit had nothing to lose. One by one, holding their breath, they ran across the moonlit street. They walked along the road to Guta-Mikhalin, then their path led through burned villages. When they reached Trukhanovichi, located 20 kilometers north of Pruzhany, Leib Solomonovich sighed with relief. That's where the zone controlled by the partisans of the S.M. Kirov detachment began.

On the second day after their disappearance, a pogrom began in Pruzhany. The Nazis shot children and the weak on the spot, while others were taken to Oranchitsy station and deported to concentration camps. Many were sent to the infamous Auschwitz.