Mr. Yisrael Kristal who survived the historic Holocaust and recognised as world’s oldest living man by Guinness World Records has reportedly passed away in Isreal on Friday at age 113 years and 330 days.
According to local news reports, He was one month away from his 114th birthday, before his demise at the northern port city of Haifa aged 113 years and 330 days,
As written in the Guinness book of world record, Kristal was born in Poland on 17 September 1903 and survived the Auschwitz death camp, where his first wife, two children and other family members were killed by the Nazis during the genocidal mission of notorious Adolf Hitler.
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He late married again after the war and moved to Israel in 1950.
Guinness certificate Kristal with an awarded as the world’s oldest man on 11 March 2016, when he was 112 years and 178 days old. He died on Friday in the northern port city of Haifa.
Jeanne Calment, a French woman, had the longest confirmed human lifespan, according to Guinness. She died in 1997 at the age of 122.
Mr Kristal was born in Zarnow in modern-day Poland on 15 September 1903 – three months before the Wright brothers’ first successful powered aeroplane flight.
After World War I ended, Mr Kristal moved to Lodz where he worked in the family sweet factory, married and had two children.
However, being a Jewish man in Germany was not favourable during Adolf Hitler genocidal mission. He was sent to the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, where around 1.1 million people, mostly European Jews, were killed between 1940 and 1945.
Kristal lost his two children in the ghetto while he and wife Chaja Feige Frucht were deported to Auschwitz concentration camp during the liquidation of the ghetto in August 1944. It was in the same camp that his wife died and he was forced into a labourer and survived.
The camp was liberated by the Red Army and Kristal was barely alive weighing only 82 pounds at the end of the war.
After the war, and Yisrael Kristal recovered at a hospital, he reportedly thanked the Soviet soldiers who liberated the camp by making them sweets.
He returned to Łódź, where he rebuilt his destroyed candy shop, met and married his second wife, Batsheva in 1947. They had two children Chaim and Shula.
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The family migrated to Isreal where he initially worked at a sweet factory but later opened his own sweet shop.
According to Guinness World Records’ website on receiving his certificate at his home in the northern Israeli city of Haifa last year, Mr Yisrael Kristal credited his longevity to his belief in God.
He had said:
“I don’t know the secret for long life. I believe that everything is determined from above and we shall never know the reasons why.
“There have been smarter, stronger and better-looking men than me who are no longer alive.”
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