This is an incredible story about a young man, Brock Cvijanovich, who sacrificed a lot to be with a 93-year-old Holocaust survivor as she ended her time on earth.
Brock Cvijanovich took care of a complete stranger, Alice Schuman, until the very end.
In September 2021, Cvijanovich, CEO of KOmanage and KORgroup, made a deal to buy one of his first apartment buildings in Binghamton, in upstate New York.
The deal, however, came with an unusual condition. He had to take care of a 93-year-old building resident named Alice Schuman.
Even though Cvijanovich was outbid for the building by $100 grand, his promise to look after the elderly Schuman convinced the seller to lower the price by $50,000. Cvijanovich took over the building and became the main caretaker for Schuman.
Cvijanovich admitted that he had no idea what this entailed — but he happily agreed.
Eventually he learned that the former property owner, who was looking to retire, had been escorting Schuman to the bank, to her doctor and to the grocery store once a month.
He was also undercharging her drastically for her rent.
He was charging her about $200 a month, while the same units in the building were going for around $2,000.
For over 60 years Schuman had been living there — and the previous owner never had the heart to raise her rent, Cvijanovich said.
So neither did he.
Every month on the first, Brock would hear a knock on his door, take the meager $200 rent payment, then drive Alice around to all her appointments.
"She literally had nobody else," he said. "That was a lot of the reason that it went the way that it did..."
And as their relationship grew, Cvijanovich eventually found out that Schuman survived the Holocaust — and came over to the U.S. from Germany after the concentration camps were liberated.
Although Cvijanovich never learned other details of her past, he did discover that her parents and sister all died in the camps.
After the budding friendship, Brock ended up saving Alice's life.
A few months into their arrangement, Cvijanovich woke up on the first of the month without a knock on his door.
A day later, as he was walking by her door, he heard faint calls for help coming from inside her apartment — so he kicked down her door and called 911.
At the hospital, medical professionals deemed Schuman unfit to take care of herself.
Her family was all killed in Nazi concentration camps, so she moved to a new country, made her way in life, and then, in the end, she had lived long enough that there was no one else to care for her.
But Brock and his family stepped in to make sure that someone was there with her at the end.
However, since she didn't have any living relatives or friends, she was going to be put in the state's care, he said.
Cvijanovich's mom, a nurse by profession, told him that Schuman wouldn't be treated too well if that happened. So he got a lawyer and became her legal guardian, along with his mom, in order to make medical decisions on her behalf.
"I was visiting her every single day. They actually had a joke on the floor that she had a young boyfriend," he said.
"I'd bring her food, I'd bring her flowers."
This is a good-hearted young man.
He didn't have to become her legal guardian. He could have left her in a state hospital, but he didn't want her to die alone in a cold hospital.
At first, it was hard for Schuman "to believe that we genuinely didn't want anything from her," Cvijanovich said.
However, when Cvijanovich and his family kept showing up at the hospital to see her — and then at the nursing home, where she was transferred — she began to trust them, he recalled.
Someone whose early life had to be defined by horror, evil, and hatred got to experience selfless compassion and love from someone who should have been a stranger.
He even kept her apartment empty for nine months while she was in the hospital, hoping that she'd be able to return home.
Cvijanovich said the best way to describe his relationship with Schuman was "goofy."
He said, "I would literally go in there and mess around with her. The nurses would think it was hysterical. She'd mess around with me, prank me, take my stuff when I wasn't looking. She thought that was hysterical."
In January of this year, Alice passed away with Brock and his mother by her side, holding her hand as she slipped away.
