Polish-born Alexander Imich, who fled Nazi rule during World War II, held title of world’s oldest man for two months before his death.
By JTA, REUTERSDr. Alexander Imich.(photo credit: REUTERS)
The world’s oldest man, a New Yorker who attempted to flee the Nazi rise to power in Poland in 1939, died on Sunday at the age of 111.Alexander Imich held the title of world’s oldest validated man for just two months before his death on Sunday. There are 66 women who were older.Imich was born in Czestochowa, in southern Poland, to a wealthy secular Jewish family, according to The New York Times. He said he was not allowed to join the Polish Navy due to anti-Semitism.He and his wife were sent from Bialystok, Poland, where they fled after the Nazis rise to power, to a Soviet labor camp. Returning to Poland after the war, they discovered that many family members had died in the Holocaust. The couple immigrated to Waterbury, Conn., in 1951.Imich told The New York Times in April that holding the record for world’s oldest man is “not like it’s the Nobel Prize” and that “I never thought I’d be that old.” He said he never drank alcohol. He and his wife, who died in 1986, had no children.Imich had credited good genes for his long life."But the life you live is equally or more important for longevity," he told Reuters last month in an interview in his apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side.Imich willed his body to the Mount Sinai Medical Center for study.
