A Tearful Reunion For Three Friends Who Defied Nazis

It was 55 years ago this month, on a cruel, rainy night in Ukraine, when a 13-year-old girl in a bathrobe and two long black braids knocked on the front door of the Vavrisevich family's home. She was a stranger to them. But for more than 15 months, with pogroms raging outside, the Vavriseviches hid her and her widowed mother under the floorboards of their house, below a bare room reserved for the cow and goat in winter.

This week, the girl, Nechama Singer Ariel, now 68, opened her apartment in Borough Park, Brooklyn, to Mikhail and Nikolai Vavrisevich, the two Greek Orthodox brothers, now 73 and 71, who along with their parents turned their home in Vladimir-Volynski into a life-saving shelter for seven Jews, including Mrs. Ariel and her mother, during the Holocaust.

It was a reunion so beyond belief that Mikhail's eyes, now nearly blind, kept watering yesterday, as the three sat around Mrs. Ariel's dining table, recounted their past and spoke of their emotional meeting this week.

''I stopped breathing,'' Mikhail, a college professor, said in Ukrainian, as Mrs. Ariel translated. ''I covered her face with tears. I would have recognized her voice among thousands and thousands, even though I am blind.''

For her part, Mrs. Ariel, who moved to New York City in 1947, said she was so undone by the whole thing that she did the unthinkable: This year, for the first time, she ordered a cooked turkey and then had her husband fetch the bird for the family's Thanksgiving dinner. ''I'm emotionally exhausted and physically drained,'' she confessed. ''Saving somebody's life -- you cannot put a price tag on it. They did it risking their young lives.''

The Thanksgiving reunion was organized by the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, a Manhattan-based nonprofit group that sends checks, from $30 to $150 a month, to some 1,400 Christians and Muslims who helped save Jews during the Holocaust and who are now old and poor.

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