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 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 kilometers with a heavy package on his back at about 12 years old, smuggling alcohol between the lines of the war,” his grandson said.

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 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 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 — 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 confectionary business.

Oren Kristal said his grandfather participated in one of his grandsons’ bar mitzvah just a few weeks ago.

Kristal himself only celebrated his bar mitzvah last year, a hundred years later than usual. He missed his bar mitzvah because of World War I.

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, media reported. Ian Deitch is an Associated Press writer.