Yisrael Kristal came very close to dying in the Holocaust along with millions of others—including his wife and their two children. Instead, the 112-year-old survived Auschwitz and has now been confirmed as the world's oldest man, having outlived Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime by more than 70 years, the BBC reports. Kristal, who remarried, had two children, and moved to Haifa, Israel after the war, was a slave laborer at Auschwitz and weighed just 77 pounds when the extermination camp was liberated in May, 1945. He was born in Poland in 1903 and ran successful confectionery businesses before and after the war.
"I don’t know the secret for long life," he told the Guinness Book of Records after receiving his certificate. "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. All that is left for us to do is to keep on working as hard as we can and rebuild what is lost."
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