The Oldest Man in the World Survived Auschwitz
Israel Kristal is 112 years and 178 days old. That’s quite an achievement. On Friday, representatives of Guinness World Records came to his home in Haifa, Israel, to officially give him a certificate. He’s now officially the world’s oldest living man.
Remarkably, it’s even more of an achievement than it sounds. Kristal was born in Poland on Sept. 15, 1903. He survived World War I as a child, but his father, his sole remaining parent, was killed by Russian soldiers during the conflict. He moved to the city of Lodz, Poland, as a teenage orphan, eventually finding work making candy.
When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Israel moved into the Jewish ghetto in the city of Lodz. Four years later, by which time he was in his late 30s, Kristal’s family was sent to Auschwitz, the notorious Nazi death camp. It was a horrific experience: “Two books could be written about a single day there,” he told Ha’aretz in a 2014 interview.