An Israeli citizen who survived two world wars and some of humanity's worst horrors and suffering was named the world's oldest man Friday by Guinness World Records.
Israel Kristal, age 112, said he had no secret for a long life. "I believe that everything is determined from above and we shall never know the reasons why," he said.
Kristal was born in Poland in 1903 and worked in his family's candy business before Adolf Hitler's Nazis seized Poland.
He and his family were forced to live in the infamous Warsaw ghetto, where thousands of Jews were incarcerated in just a few blocks before nearly all of them were sent to Nazi death camps.
Kristal was put in Auschwitz and weighed just 37 kilograms (less than 82 pounds) when he was freed. His wife and children had been killed.
Kristal moved to Israel, remarried, and started a successful candy business. His daughter said her father considers it a privilege to have reached his age.
Guinness said the world's oldest woman, and oldest person, is 116-year-old Susannah Mushatt Jones, an American.
