World’s oldest man dies at 113

JERUSalEM: Israel Kristal (pic), the world’s oldest man who lived through both World Wars and survived the Auschwitz concentration camp, has passed away just a month short of his 114th birthday, his family said.

Oren Kristal, a grandson, said he died on 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 in 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, his grandson 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 shortly after World War I and moved to Lodz to work in the family confectionery business in 1920.

During the Nazi occupation of Poland, Kristal was confined to the ghetto there and later sent to Auschwitz and other concentration camps. His first wife and two children were killed in the Holocaust. Six million Jews were systematically murdered by German Nazis and their collaborators during WWII.

Kristal survived World War II weighing only 37kg – the only survivor of his large family.

He later married another Holocaust survivor and moved with her to Israel in 1950 where he built a new family and a successful confectionery business. — AP