After Brock Cvijanovich kicked down 93-year-old Alice Schuman’s door, he became her legal guardian and held her hand as she took her last breath. In 2021, he bought the building in which she had lived for 60 years and agreed to take her on monthly errands. But one time, he heard sounds of distress and broke down the door. In hospital and then a nursing home, Cvijanovich learned she was a German-born Holocaust survivor who lost both parents and her sister in death camps, and lost two husbands, one to suicide and another to an accident, in the US. On her own for decades, she got by because the building owner – and later Cvijanovich – kept her rent at $200. Cvijanovich and his mother funded her nursing home care. “She was grateful for everything, even though she had no family, no friends, and no money,” he said. Before she died of pneumonia in January, Binghamton’s Jewish community came together to help care for her.
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