They $40 million estate of Holocaust survivor and Staten Island developer Roman Blum, who died in 2012, is still being disputed among potential heirs ten years on from his death

They $40 million estate of Holocaust survivor and Staten Island developer Roman Blum, who died in 2012, is still being disputed among potential heirs ten years on from his death

They $40 million estate of Holocaust survivor and Staten Island developer Roman Blum, who died in 2012, is still being disputed among potential heirs ten years on from his death

A decade-long search for the relatives of Holocaust survivor Roman Blum – who passed away in January 2012 is still continuing, but his $40 million estate, which was the largest unclaimed estate in New York history, is slowly dwindling with the case yet to be resolved.

With no apparent surviving family members – his wife died 31-years ago and the couple was childless – the 97-year-old property mogul’s estate was taken on by the state after he passed without a will.

However a descendent of one of his long lost loves has since come forward to claim Blum wrote a ‘secret will’ despite it never being formally filed. The validity of such a document is currently being  played out in court.

Either way, the $40 million dollar fortune is slowly being whittled down by taxes and attorney fees while would-be heirs are still attempting to claim for their share. 

‘I can say there’s about half of it left, probably. Right now there are two parties who are claiming a right to Mr. Blum’s estate and it’s playing out in court,’ said Richmond County Public Administrator Edwina Frances Martin to the New York Post.

At the time of his death in 2013, Blum’s estate also included about $4 million in cash in his checking account.

His home in Staten Island was worth $729,000 – undeveloped land in Forest Avenue worth $4.5 million and a safe deposit box containing 7,000 in $100 bills.

Friends have told New York Times that they do not know why he failed to write a will.

Roman Blum's home in Staten Island was modest for a man who amassed a fortune of almost $40 million over the course of his 97-years

Roman Blum’s home in Staten Island was modest for a man who amassed a fortune of almost $40 million over the course of his 97-years

Some claim that it was a refusal to admit his mortality while others feared it was simply a refusal to share the full details of his estate with a lawyer. 

Any relatives still living would have received the money by now – despite the absence of a will.

One potential heir is 44-year-old Moscow resident, Maxim Shimnyuk, who claims to be Blum’s great-grandson.

Court documents attempt to make the link between Shimnyuk and Blum but it date back to wartime.

Before he immigrated to America, Blum married Ester Lajzerevna in Poland. The couple had a daughter, Hannah, in 1937.

Hannah’s daughter, Tatyana, born in 1954 and gave birth to Shimnyuk in October 1977, the legal papers claim.

But Hannah died in 2001 at the age of 64 while Tatyana passed away in 2011 at 57.

Shimnyuk claims he ‘is the only lineal descendant … of Roman Blum, and would therefore be the only person entitled to inherit from the estate,’ according to a genealogy report filed in Staten Island Surrogate Court.

But a second link also exists and involves a ‘secret will’ in which a long-lost love of Blum’s was bequeathed everything.

Blum was said to have met 20-year-old Helen Pietrucha in 1938, in Poland, when he was 26. 

Little is known about Blum's life before the Holocaust and the end of the Second World War. Pictured, young Jewish men being carted off in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941

Little is known about Blum’s life before the Holocaust and the end of the Second World War. Pictured, young Jewish men being carted off in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941

It was one year before the Nazis invaded with the couple’s plan to marry halted by the start of World War II.

They hid on her family’s farm but ultimately the Russian’s deported Pietrucha and her family to Siberia in February 1940.

Pietrucha hid Roman in a dugout before the couple were pulled apart. 

‘In my eyes, I have a picture of that horrible night when you were taken to Siberia. In my eyes I have a picture of that last loaf of bread you managed to give me,’ Blum wrote to her many years later.

Roman later spent five years in concentration camps in Poland and Germany before he was freed in 1945. 

He was never able to determine until many years later, by which time she had married another man.

Blum also married another woman in New York but they never had children, 

The Varrazano Narrows Bridge, from Brooklyn to Staten Island - opened up new business opportunities for Roman Blum

The Varrazano Narrows Bridge, from Brooklyn to Staten Island – opened up new business opportunities for Roman Blum

In his final letter to Pietrucha, Blum allegedly included a will, which stated, ‘I give all my estate after my death to my beloved Helen ­Pietrucha.’

But the secret will Blum was never filed in Staten Island, and the only two witnesses who signed the document in 1987 have passed away. 

Pietrucha too, died in 1999 at the age of 79.

The love story is told by Pietrucha’s longtime friend and caregiver Teresa Musial inherited her estate following her death. She also believes she has a right to claim Blum’s riches. 

Blum’s wife, who died in 1992 would also not have been eligible – so the hope had been to find a blood relative back in Poland – as all attempts in the U.S. have failed. 

Friends who knew him described Blum as a gregarious ladies man, who liked to drink and party and who built up one of the most prominent real estate empires in the New York borough of Staten Island through decades of hard work. 

However, despite his business acumen and the lease of life surviving the Holocaust gave him, Blum has been described in no uncertain terms by one friend who also made it through the concentration camps of the 1940s.

‘He was a very smart man but he died like an idiot,’ said Paul Skurka, who became friends with Blum in the 1970s after working for him at one of his homes.

The millionaire’s 2013 funeral was attended by only a small number of elderly friends who knew each other from their days as a community of Holocaust survivors in Forest Hills, Queens.

When asked by the New York Times, those friends could only paint a picture of the man they knew from when he managed to gain a visa and enter the United States in 1949.

Little is known about his life before even the Holocaust and the end of the Second World War.

Born in Chelm, in the south of Poland, some speculate that Blum had a wife and child who died in the concentration camps, but even his birth date is questionable.

An identity card from a displaced persons camp at the end of the war has his birthday as September 15, 1914 – while his U.S. birth-date is registered as September 16, 1914,

Regardless of what seems an inconsequential date error, the real mystery is why Blum, an intelligent man, provided no will for his enormous fortune.

‘I spoke to Roman many times before he passed away, and he knew what to do, how to name beneficiaries,’ said Mason D. Corn, his accountant and friend for 30 years to the New York Times.

It seems that only two weeks before his death, Blum intended to produce a will, but died before he could – as Corn went on vacation and his client passed away.

Leaving the concentration camps behind after the war in 1945, Blum encountered a family of fellow survivors who had two daughters.

One, named Eva, had been in the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp.

Roman married the lady, but friends said that sadly it was not a wedding based on love.

‘It was immediately after the war — he thought she was the last Jewish woman alive, and she thought there were no more men,’ said a friend to the New York Times.

Intriguingly, this friend spoke to the newspaper on the condition of anonymity in case it appeared that they were trying to stake a claim to the Blum estate.

This same friend revealed that in 1946, Blum and his wife traveled to a camp on the outskirts of Frankfurt where he became a cigarette smuggler – showing off the beginnings of his flair for business.

His unusual marriage became apparent when Blum decamped to west Berlin to live the high life – while Eva remained outside Frankfurt.

Granted their visas in 1949, the pair moved to Forest Hills, where they became part of a tightknit group of fellow survivors – many who had known the Blums from Germany.

‘They all lived the same type of lifestyle, going to the bungalow colonies together, the Catskills, everything was done as a group,’ said Jack Shnay, a child of survivors to the Times.

Charles Goldgrub, whose parents grew up with the Blums described the joyous lifestyle led by the Jews who had escaped Hitler’s concentration camp.

‘Every weekend was a party,’ said Goldgrub. ‘They had survived Hitler so they thought they would live forever.’

Developing his home-building business, Blum became successful, living a life of exuberance likened to that of the Italian organized crime families.

‘There were lots of women on the side,’ explained Goldgrub. ‘It was a way of life, everyone knew — the wives just closed their eyes to it.’

As a backdrop to this, the Blum’s failed to start their own family – spending tens of thousands of dollars on medical bills.

A hurtful rumor even circulated that Eva had been rendered infertile bu the inhuman experiments of Josef Mengele while at Auschwitz.

Indeed, on a five-week cruise to Israel in the 1960s aboard the Queen Elizabeth cruise liner, Blum found a boy he wanted to adopt.

His wife declined, hoping that she would be able to conceive naturally.

Upon the opening of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which links Brooklyn and Staten Island – Blum’s property business exploded as he bought up cheap property in neighborhoods like Eltingville, Huguenot and Manor Heights.

His marriage again fell into a state of flux when he moved to his large but modest brick house in Staten Island, leaving his wife of over forty years behind in Queens.

‘He wanted her to go live with him in his big house with a swimming pool, but she loved the city,’ said the friend who wished to be unidentified. 

‘All her friends were there, and with his lifestyle, if she went with him, she knew she would be alone a lot.’ Eva Blum stayed in Queens while Blum moved into the new house.

Divorcing a while later, Blum again returned to the life of a bachelor with Sunday barbecues becoming the hottest ticket amongst his circle of friends.

However, the way in which he treated his wife caused a riff in the Jewish community and people took sides.

Becoming increasingly suspicious that people were trying to steal his money, Blum once hid $40,000 in his ceiling.

When it went missing, he falsely accused a neighbor of stealing it.

An unidentified friend is still full of hope though that eventually an heir will be found.

‘I believe a will is written,’ the friend said.

‘Somewhere there is a plan: he made arrangements to use the money to build a home for children and to dedicate it to his child from before the war. I am sure of it.’

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