• Article by: JULIE SATOW
• New York Times
• April 27, 2013 - 7:25 PM

NEW YORK – When Roman Blum died last year at age 97, his body lingered in the Staten Island University Hospital morgue for four days, until a rabbi at the hospital was able to track down his lawyer.

Blum, a Holocaust survivor and real estate developer, left behind no heirs and no surviving family members. His funeral, held graveside at the New Montefiore Jewish Cemetery in West Babylon, N.Y., was attended by a small number of mourners, most of them elderly fellow survivors or children of survivors.

Much about Blum’s life was shrouded in mystery: He always claimed he was from Warsaw, although many who knew him said he came from Chelm, in southeast Poland. Several people close to Blum said that before World War II, he had a wife and child who died in the Holocaust, though Blum seems never to have talked of them.

Perhaps the greatest mystery surrounding Blum is why a successful developer, who built hundreds of houses around Staten Island and left behind an estate valued at almost $40 million, would die without a will. That is no small matter, as his is the largest unclaimed estate in New York state history, said the state comptroller’s office.

“He was a very smart man, but he died like an idiot,” said Paul Skurka, a Holocaust survivor and friend of Blum.

Gary D. Gotlin, the public administrator handling the case, sold Blum’s home on Staten Island, auctioned off his jewelry and furniture and is putting other properties that he owned on the market. Gotlin’s office, which is overseen by Surrogate’s Court in Richmond County, also is using Blum’s estate to pay his taxes, conduct an in-depth search for a will and hire a genealogist to search for relatives. If none are identified, the money will pass into the state’s coffers.

Much of what is known about Roman Blum’s life comes from a circle of fellow Holocaust survivors who met in displaced persons camps after the war. They said that when war broke out, Blum was in Poland and, fearing capture, ran alone across the border to Russia, where he was briefly detained and placed in prison. The Russians soon released him along with thousands of other prisoners to fight the Nazis.

In the months after the war, Blum met a family of survivors with two daughters. One of them, Eva, had been in the Auschwitz concentration camp, and he married her. “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 and Holocaust survivor.

The Blums struggled to start a family. According to stories that swirled around the couple, Eva Blum had been a subject Dr. Josef Mengele while at Auschwitz, and his experiments had rendered her infertile.

In the 1960s, on a five-week trip to Israel, Roman Blum found an orphan boy whom he wished to adopt. Friends said Eva Blum begged him not to do it, convinced her doctors would be able to help them conceive. They did not adopt the boy and never had children. The Blums eventually divorced, and Blum lived the life of a bachelor.

His friends hope that Roman Blum had siblings back in Poland or that some distant relations still live in Europe.

Yet despite a worldwide search that included Poland and Israel, Gotlin said, “to date, there is no evidence of any living relatives.”