World’s oldest man, a Holocaust survivor, dies just shy of 114th birthday
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 told the Associated Press.
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 kilometers with a heavy package on his back at about 12 years old, smuggling alcohol between the lines of the war,” Oren 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 confectionary business in 1920.
During the Nazi occupation of Poland Kristal was confined to the ghetto there and later sent to Auschwitz. His first wife and two children were killed in the Holocaust. Six million Jews were murdered by German Nazis and their collaborators during World War II.
“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 World War II weighing only about 81 pounds. He later married another Holocaust survivor and moved with her in 1950 to Israel, where he built a new family and a successful confectionary business.
He is survived by two children and numerous grandchildren and greatgrandchildren, media reported.