In June 1939, Ilse Marcus was so tantalizingly close to the saving shores of the United States that she could see the palm trees of Miami.
But the American Government refused to provide a refuge for her and the 906 other German Jews aboard the St. Louis who were fleeing their homeland's Nazi terror. The ocean liner, which had already been turned away from Cuba, was forced to return to Europe, where the passengers were dispersed to Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Britain.
Until recently, the fate of passengers like Mrs. Marcus was lost in a murky ether, with the passengers used as a collective symbol for the world's indifference to the fate of Europe's Jews, but bleached of their individual human stories. It was assumed, incorrectly it has turned out, that nearly all of them died after Western Europe came under the murderous sway of the Nazis.
But for three years, two research historians at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington have been tracing what happened to every single passenger and fleshing out their stories as well as they can. They have learned that about half the passengers, Mrs. Marcus among them, managed through pluck, endurance and the whims of fortune to survive the war.
Now as the voyage's 60th anniversary approaches and the museum mounts a memorial exhibition from April 11 to Sept. 6, they are closing in on their goal of accounting for each passenger. Only 36 remain whose fate the researchers have not determined, although there are others for whom they want to compile more rounded pictures. The researchers' objective is to give shape to a lives that otherwise would be lost in a void. Though it was not their intent, their work also has a contemporary resonance in the tens of thousands of refugees now streaming out of Kosovo in Yugoslavia.
''We're trying to recover them from history,'' said Scott Miller, a researcher. ''If we want to tell the consequences of America's sending the ship back, we have to tell their stories.''
''People want some kind of finality,'' said his colleague, Sarah A. Ogilvie. ''They want to know not just that their relative died at Auschwitz, but that they died in Auschwitz on this day, at this time and by these means.''
Mrs. Marcus, they found out last fall, did not die in Auschwitz, where the Nazi records said she had been sent. For the last 50 years, she has been living in a tidy apartment in Washington Heights in Manhattan and working as a bookkeeper for the New York office of the Jesuits.
Within a year after disembarking from the St. Louis in Antwerp, Mrs. Marcus was scrambling for survival in Brussels, assuming a Belgian identity and shifting her hiding places. Eventually she, her husband, mother, father and brother were taken to concentration camps. Only Mrs. Marcus made it out alive, though she had been reduced to a skeletal 75 pounds, and had a bitter grievance against the United States that she could never relinquish.
A Grievance Lingers Against the U.S.
''It's amazing!'' said Mrs. Marcus, chatting with a deceptive geniality in her apartment. ''This country was built on immigrants and there was no room in this country for 900 people who were in danger of death.''
To unearth the individual stories in a tale that was later called ''The Voyage of the Damned,'' the museum's historical detectives have pored through the lists the Nazis kept of those deported, those registered to work, those given death certificates.
They have examined lists of inmates liberated from camps, and manifests of ships bound for the United States. They have searched through old phone books in the New York Public Library, sent E-mail to Jewish leaders in Latin America, and interviewed many of the 100 passengers (85 in the United States) who are still alive.
The paper trail they have accumulated offers a panorama of the larger Holocaust, with St. Louis passengers perishing in gas chambers, shambling out of the death camps, enduring in hiding, or secretly making their way to safety in the United States or Israel. Only for 36 does the trail run cold soon after the voyage's end.
In recent weeks, they went to Washington Heights -- the German Jewish enclave whose streets nurtured such refugees as Henry Kissinger and Ruth Westheimer -- and visited synagogues, social agencies and refugee families in hopes of gleaning shreds about passengers.
At Congregation Mount Sinai Ansche Emeth on West 187th Street, its president, Herbert Harwitt, a slightly built prewar refugee, showed the researchers 15-year-old membership lists that bore a name, Minna Muenz, resembling that of a passenger's. The researchers knew that their Meta Munz, born in 1912 in Altengronau, Germany, and her family found haven in Belgium after the St. Louis debacle. They also knew that Ms. Munz's father, Karl, died in the Gurs internment camp in France, that her mother, Sophie, and sister, Paula, were sent to Auschwitz in 1942. But they had no record of Meta Munz. Could Minna Muenz on Waldo Avenue in Riverdale be their Meta Munz?
Refugees can be suspicious. So the researchers trekked 10 blocks downtown and asked Eva Knoller, who runs the Washington Heights office of Selfhelp Community Services, to make calls for them. Mrs. Knoller, a refugee herself as a child, has a knack for disarming her compatriots, telling one that the researchers' project ''is like a big puzzle.''
''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.
''We were all very happy because we thought this was our last chance to escape terror,'' Mrs. Marcus said.
The voyage to Cuba was surreally tranquil. Capt. Gustav Schroeder and crew arranged formal dinners with veal Marengo, costume balls, even worship services for the Jewish holiday of Shavuot. But when the ship arrived in Cuban waters, President Laredo Bru, worried about anti-immigrant resentment fanned by Nazi agents, refused to let it berth. He demanded authentic visas, which only 28 passengers had.
The ship anchored outside Havana for seven days while men who had arrived on previous voyages hired rowboats to take them to the St. Louis so they could shout messages to their sobbing wives and children on deck. American emissaries bargained frantically with Cuban officials, two passengers attempted suicide, and journalists flocked to the riveting drama. Among those allowed to disembark were Miriam Bonne and her two young children, Beatrice and Jack. Her husband, Martin, already in Cuba, was able to secure visas through an acquaintance married to the daughter of Havana's mayor.
''That evening I saw my husband for the first time crying,'' recalled Mrs. Bonne, a thin, red-headed woman whose daughter and son grew up in Washington Heights to become a professor and a stock consultant.
Roosevelt Refuses To Intervene
On June 2, the St. Louis raised anchor. It drifted along the Florida coast for five days while telegrams implored President Franklin D. Roosevelt to intervene. With isolationist sentiments, tinged by anti-Semitism, riding high, the pleas were rejected. That played into Goebbels's strategy to show the world that Germans had no more antipathy for Jews than anyone else did.
''Here's the country with the Statue of Liberty and here's this boat and these people are desperate and they can see the lights of Miami, and the Coast Guard is there to make sure nobody swims ashore,'' said David S. Wyman, author of ''The Abandonment of the Jews,'' a study of world response to the Holocaust. ''It's a broader picture of a world that didn't have room for Jews.''
As the ship crossed the Atlantic, a pact was reached to prevent the passengers' return to Germany. Britain accepted 287 passengers, France 224, Belgium 214 and the Netherlands 181. When three of those countries came under Nazi rule, some passengers were trapped once more.
This month, ferreting out the story of Moses Hammerschlag, the researchers visited the Washington Heights apartment of Victoria Hammerschlag Rosenberg, an Orthodox woman who escaped Germany and entered the United States as a 9-year-old in 1946 to live with her Uncle Moses in his cramped two-room apartment. The animated Mrs. Rosenberg told how Mr. Hammerschlag, sick with arteriosclerosis and heartbroken at the loss of a wife he could not get out of Germany, died in 1947 at 64.
''Isn't that a terrible thing what they did,'' she says of the American Government as she scans the list of passengers. ''It's like it's not real.''
'The War Came Before She Came'
She put the researchers in touch with her cousin, Henry Hammerschlag, 78, in Florida. By phone, he told them that his father, Moses, a cattle dealer, hid in Brussels in 1940 with a family named Steinmetz and pestered American officials to give him a visa. His wife, Miriam, who had not joined him on the St. Louis because she needed to place her father in a rest home, was on a waiting list for an American visa, but as Henry put it, ''The war came before she came.'' After 1942, Moses Hammerschlag never heard from her again. Henry Hammerschlag learned on a postwar trip to Germany that his mother had been put on a transport to Lublin, Poland, on May 12, 1942, but never arrived.
Moses Hammerschlag, the researchers have also learned, is buried in Cedar Park Cemetery in Paramus, N.J., in the eternal embrace of the land that in 1939 turned him and his fellow passengers away.
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