''It's nothing bad, don't get scared,'' she said. ''They're just trying to trace people.''

Minna Muenz told her she was not on the St. Louis, but said there was a Walter Munz in Riverdale who might know more. Walter Munz told Mrs. Knoller that Meta Munz had been a neighbor in Altengronau, one of the village's 46 Jews, and that her brother Morris was living in Forest Hills, Queens. Mrs. Knoller called Morris Munz's number and left a message.

The next day she received a call from a Cynthia Munz in New Paltz, N.Y., who said that her father, Morris, had died last year at 87 but was indeed Meta's brother. She said her father kept locked inside him whatever he remembered about his slain family, telling her only that they died in unspecified camps. All he had to show of Meta was a yellowed photograph of a dark-haired woman with a solemn smile. Cynthia Munz could not say whether her aunt had been clever or dull, affectionate or cold.

''It's somewhat typical of children of survivors whose parents don't talk about what happened,'' Ms. Munz, a psychotherapist, said in an interview. ''I never even thought of Meta as my aunt. She wasn't a real person to me. She was my father's sister who disappeared during the war.''

Ms. Munz did leave the researchers with one promising thread: her father left behind correspondence in German about his efforts to get his family out of Europe.

The St. Louis story symbolized the world's callous response to Europe's Jews, but it was also a richly cinematic episode, with enough intrigue and colorful characters to rival ''Casablanca.'' (It resulted in a book and movie.)

There was a steel-willed captain who provided passengers with solicitous service despite Nazi protests, a malevolent Nazi spy posing as a crew member, a wealthy couple who came to the Hamburg pier in dinner jacket and gown, two young girls sent off alone by their mother to join their father in Cuba, and a headstrong American lawyer who bargained his way out of a deal that might have let more passengers reach Cuban soil.

Flying the Nazi swastika, the twin-smokestack ship left Hamburg on May 13, 1939, six months after the Kristallnacht pogroms made it clear that Jewish oppression would worsen. The 937 passengers who boarded -- about half women with children eager to join husbands who had already emigrated to Cuba -- had paid $160 apiece for ''landing permits'' signed by Cuba's immigration minister, who was pocketing the money.