112-year-old Auschwitz survivor may be world's oldest man

A Holocaust survivor aged 112 is believed to have become the world’s oldest living man this week following the death of a Japanese man two months before his 113 birthday.

Yisrael Kristal, who was born in Poland on 15 September 1903, now lives with his family in Haifa.

The Gerontology Research Group, which verifies the ages of people believed to be at least 110 years old, is now trying to determine if Kristal is eligible for the list and his case has been submitted to the Guinness World Records organisation.

On being told of the news, Kristal said that he saw it as “the joy of my old age”, the Haaretz newspaper reported. 

However, the Gerontology Research Group still needs to receive documentation dating from the first 20 years of Kristal’s life in order for his inclusion. His marriage certificate, first issued in Poland when he was 25, is the oldest document he has.

The organisation is ruling on whether it can make an exception.

Kristal was born in a small town about 150km south of Warsaw. He came from a deeply religious family and learned Hebrew and Yiddish at a young age.

According to Haaretz, the young Kristal saw the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph I in person before the First World War broke out. When he was 20 he went to work for the family's confectionary business.

“It was hard physical work. I schlepped 25kg bags of sugar,” he told Haaretz.

After the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany in 1939, Kristal and his family were forced into ghettos with other Jews.

In 1944 he and his wife were sent to the Auschwitz death camp, where she died before the camp was liberated by Russian forces in 1945.

Kristal subsequently remarried and in 1950 moved to Israel with his second wife and their son, where he continued to make sweets until his retirement.

Until last week, Yasutaro Koide of Japan was officially the world’s oldest man, dying just two months short of his 113th birthday. The world’s oldest-recorded man was Jiroemon Kimora, also Japanese, who died aged 116 in June 2013.

The current oldest living person is an American woman, 116-year-old Susannah Mushatt Jones of Brooklyn, New York.

Jeanne Louise Calment of France, who died aged 122 years and 164 days in August 1997 is believed to have been the oldest-ever person.

Last year Middle East Eye ran a story about Rajab al-Tom, a Palestinian man in Gaza, who the Palestinian enclave's ministry of health said was 127 years old. MEE was unable to verify his claim.