World’s oldest man, Holocaust survivor, dies at 113 in Israel

Polish native started confectionary business after war.

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

Oren Kristal said his grandfather died Friday.

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

Last year Guinness World Records awarded Israel 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,” 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,” he 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 he was confined to the ghetto there and later sent to Auschwitz and other concentration camps. His first wife and two children died 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,” Kristal’s grandson said.

At the end of World War II, Kristal — starved in the concentration camps — weighed only about 80 pounds and was the only survivor of his large family.

He later married another Holocaust survivor and moved with her in 1950 to Israel, where he started a new family and a successful confectionary business.