Israel Kristal, the world’s oldest man who, lived through both world wars and survived Auschwitz, has passed away on Friday just a month short of his 114th birthday, his family said on Saturday.
“He managed to accomplish a lot. Every year he lived was like a few years for somebody else,” said Oren Kristal, a grandson.
Guinness World Records last year awarded Kristal a certificate as the world’s oldest man.
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 said.
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.
“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 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.
“He was a very hard-working man, a lot of energy, always running from one place to another doing something,” Oren said.
He said his grandfather participated his great-grandson’s bar mitzvah just a few weeks ago.
An observant Jew, Kristal himself only celebrated his bar mitzvah last year, a hundred 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.
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