During World War II he was confined by the Nazi regime to a Jewish ghetto. His children died in the ghetto, but he and his wife were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Kristal survived the Holocaust, but his wife did not. He remarried shortly after the War and, in 1950, emigrated to Haifa, Israel, with his second wife Batsheva, also a survivor of the Holocaust, and their infant child, and lived in Haifa until his death at age 113 years, 330 days.