The world’s oldest man, a New Yorker who attempted to flee the Nazi rise to power in Poland in 1939, died at the age of 111.

Alexander Imich held the title of world’s oldest validated man for just two months before his death June 8. There are 66 women who were older.

Imich was born in Czestochowa, in southern Poland. He and his wife  spent WWII in a Soviet labor camp. Many of their family members 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 …the Nobel Prize.” He willed his body to the Mount Sinai Medical Center for study. — jta