World’s oldest man, a Holocaust survivor, dies at 113

JERUSALEM — Israel Kristal, the world’s oldest man who lived through both World Wars and survived the Auschwitz concentration camp, has died just a month short of his 114th birthday, his family said Saturday.

Oren Kristal, a grandson, said he died Friday. “He managed to accomplish a lot. Every year he lived was like a few years for somebody else,” Oren said.

Last year, Guinness World Records awarded Kristal a certificate as the world’s oldest man at his home in Haifa, Israel.

Kristal was born to an Orthodox Jewish family near the town of Zarnow, Poland, in 1903.

“When he was a child during World War I in Poland, he was a helper for a booze smuggler. He used to run barefoot in the snow through the night many kilometres with a heavy package on his back at about 12 years old, smuggling alcohol between the lines of the war,” Oren Kristal said.

“He used to walk very fast until he was very old, faster than me, and he used to tell me that when he was my age if you didn’t walk fast enough, your feet would stick to the frozen ground,” Oren recalled his grandfather telling him.

Kristal was orphaned soon after the First World War and moved to Lodz to work in the family confectionary business in 1920.

During the Nazi occupation of Poland, Kristal was confined to the ghetto and later sent to Auschwitz and other concentration camps. His first wife and two children were killed in the Holocaust. “He used to tell us whenever we were mourning someone that we should consider that they are being buried in the land of Israel. Most of the people he knew did not get to be buried in a grave when they died,” Oren said.

Kristal survived the Second World War weighing 81 pounds — the only survivor of his family.

He married another Holocaust survivor and moved with her to Israel in 1950 where he built a new family and a successful confectionary business. “He was a very hard working man, a lot of energy always running from one place to another doing something,” Oren said.

He said his grandfather participated in one of his great-grandsons bar mitzvah a few weeks ago.

An observant Jew, Kristal himself only celebrated his bar mitzvah last year, a hundred years later than usual. He missed his bar mitzvah — the Jewish coming-ofage ceremony celebrated when a boy turns 13 — because of the First World War.

Oren said his grandfather gave no explanation to the secret for his incredible longevity.

He is survived by two children and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.