The world's oldest man, Yisrael Kristal -- 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 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. At the time, his daughter, Shula Kuperstoch, said she felt her father's faith and optimism had helped him live into old age. "Father is a religious man, a man of faith," she said. "He wakes up each morning and puts on tefillin. He says we must take everything in proportion, both the good and the bad." Kristal was born to an Orthodox Jewish family near the town of Zarnow in Poland on Sept. 15, 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 as a teenager 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, Feige, and their 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 World War II weighing only 37 kilograms (82 pounds) -- the only survivor of his large family. He moved to Israel in 1950 with his second wife, Batsheva, also a Holocaust survivor, and their son. In Israel, Kristal and his wife had a daughter and two more sons, one of whom died as an infant. Kristal owned a successful confectionary business in Haifa. "He was a very hard working man, a lot of energy always running from one place to another, doing something," Oren, his grandson said. He said his grandfather participated in the bar mitzvah of one of his great-grandsons just a few weeks ago. An observant Jew, Kristal himself only celebrated his bar mitzvah last year, 100 years later than usual. He missed his bar mitzvah -- the Jewish coming-of-age ceremony celebrated when a boy turns 13 -- because of World War I. He is survived by two children, nine grandchildren and 32 great-grandchildren, all of whom live in Israel.
Credit: Reuters
Last year, Guinness World Records awarded Kristal a certificate as the world's oldest man at his home in Haifa.
