Tailor to presidents and stars survived Nazi concentration camps as a teen
b August 9, 1928 d March 20,, 2024
The first US president to don a suit crafted by Martin Greenfield was Dwight D Eisenhower. By chance, the two men had met before Eisenhower entered the White House, far away from the Brooklyn garment factory that Greenfield built into one of the most venerable clothiers in the United States, an outfitter of movie stars and business titans, politicians and power brokers of all kinds.
In April 1945, as supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe, then-General Eisenhower visited Buchenwald, the Nazi concentration camp in Germany liberated days earlier by American forces. The horrors he witnessed, Eisenhower would later say, “beggar description”. He gazed upon the skeletal corpses strewn about the camp and met the starving prisoners, many of them seemingly suspended between life and death, who had survived the Nazi slaughter.
One of those prisoners was Greenfield, a 16-year-old Czech Jew who was the only member of his immediate family alive at the end of the Holocaust. Shaking Eisenhower’s hand that day in the camp, Greenfield had the impression, he later recollected, that the general was “10 feet tall”. Neither of them could have imagined that within a few years, Greenfield, newly arrived in America, would be outfitting him in a wardrobe custom made to fit what was in fact his more modest 5-foot, 10-inch frame.
Greenfield, who died on March 20 at 95, largely kept to himself his Holocaust survival story as he rose from floor boy at GGG Clothes to owner of Martin Greenfield Clothiers, as he renamed the company after purchasing it in 1977.
Greenfield dressed generations of entertainment stars, among them Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr, Paul Newman, Martin Scorsese, Al Pacino and Leonardo DiCaprio, and athletes including Patrick Ewing, Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant and LeBron James.
New York City mayors Ed Koch and Mike Bloomberg wore his suits. General Colin L Powell, as former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and future secretary of state, began patronising Martin Greenfield Clothiers as he transitioned from military to civilian life. He thanked Greenfield for “changing my uniform”. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, travelled to New York to avail himself of Greenfield’s services.
Whether before, during or after their presidencies, Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden were among Greenfield’s clients. Clinton, whom he personally measured, needed a particular assist, the tailor said, when he left the Arkansas governor’s mansion for the White House.
Perusing Clinton’s closet in the White House residence, “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Greenfield wrote in a 2014 memoir, Measure of a Man: From Auschwitz Survivor to Presidents’ Tailor, co-authored with Wynton Hall. “A couple of short leather jackets,” he continued, “more jogging suits than any man needs to own, a ratty old overcoat so ugly I was tempted to throw it away on the spot, and a couple of average, off-the-rack suits.”
Greenfield recalled asking a White House aide, “These are really the president’s clothes?”
For years, despite his intimacy with his clients, few if any of them had any inkling of Greenfield’s past – the murder of his family or the time he spent at Auschwitz before he was subjected to a forced march and then sent on to Buchenwald. Clients might have overlooked the number tattooed on his arm if Greenfield rolled up his shirt sleeves.
“For 40 years, I didn’t talk about my past to anybody… ever,” he told Vanity Fair in 2014. “A lot of my clients were shocked when they came to a celebration when I was 80 years old to see that I was a refugee,” he continued, “a survivor.”
Maximilian Grünfeld was born in Pavlovo, a town then located in Czechoslovakia and now in Ukraine, on August 9, 1928. His father, an industrial engineer, and his mother, a homemaker, raised him, his two sisters and his brother in affluent circumstances.
After the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Greenfield – he changed his name years later upon arriving in America – left for Budapest. During the celebration of Passover in 1944, the family was rounded up for deportation to Auschwitz.
Selections – for death or for labour – cleaved families upon arrival at the camp. Greenfield remained briefly with his father, who presented his son, then 15, as a skilled mechanic, but Greenfield ended up in a detail assigned to wash the clothing of Nazi guards. Scrubbing an SS shirt, he accidentally ripped the collar. The mistake brought him a beating. When the guard had finished, he threw the shirt to Greenfield.
Amid the deprivation of the camp, an extra shirt was a valuable commodity. After another prisoner taught him the basics of sewing and helped him mend the collar, Greenfield began wearing the shirt under his striped prison uniform, and found that his station in the camp had changed.
“From that day on, the soldiers treated me a little bit better. They thought I was somebody – someone who mattered, someone not to be killed,” he wrote in his memoir.
“The shirt means something, I thought. And so, I wore the shirt. In fact, I ripped another one on purpose so I could have two. The day I first wore that shirt was the day I learned clothes possess power. Clothes don’t just ‘make the man’, they can save the man. They did for me.”
After their first days at Auschwitz, Greenfield never saw his father again. But years later, he learned that they were only several barracks away from one another after their transfer to Buchenwald, according to his son, Tod Greenfield.
Because of his expertise in engineering, Greenfield’s father was tasked by the Germans with building a bridge. When the bridge was complete, Tod Greenfield said, he and the other prisoners who worked on the project were executed. Greenfield’s mother, sisters and brother also were murdered in the Holocaust.
Greenfield made menswear for the fashion lines of Donna Karan and Perry Ellis, among other designers, and his clothes were sold by Brooks Brothers and Neiman Marcus. In 2009, GQ declared him “America’s Greatest Living Tailor”.
Greenfield, who lived in the Long Island village of North Hills, reported for work at his factory six days a week well into his older age. Some years ago, he turned over operations to his two sons, Tod and Jay.
Besides his sons, survivors include his wife of 67 years, Arlene, and four grandchildren.
Martin Greenfield Clothiers has provided costumes for television shows including Boardwalk Empire, and Billions, as well as films including Scent of a Woman (1992), Argo (2012), The Wolf of Wall Street and The Great Gatsby (both 2013), and Bridge of Spies (2015).
Perhaps the company’s most celebrated film costume was the red-and-orange suit worn by Joaquin Phoenix as the title character – Batman’s archenemy – in Joker (2019).
Remembering the shirt that had changed the course of his imprisonment at Auschwitz, Greenfield said he did not know if it had saved his life, but that it had certainly lifted his spirits, because the collar made him feel – if only distantly – like the person he had been before he was shorn of his clothing and every other remnant of his life before the camps.
He found some truth, for himself as well as his clients, in the adage that the “clothes make the man”. But “the measure of the man is not just clothes,” he once told ABC News. “The measure of the man is more.”
– The Washington Post