Israel Kristal, the oldest man in the world, died Friday, his family reported, after becoming ill the previous day. He was 113, just one month shy of his 114th birthday.
Born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Poland in 1903, Kristal lived through both world wars and survived imprisonment in Nazi Germany's Auschwitz concentration camp, where his first wife was murdered. Two of Kristal's children were also killed during the Nazi occupation of Poland, but in spite of "all that he went through ... he had a lot of optimism," said his daughter, Shula Koperstoch, "and he always saw only light and good in everything."
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