Martin Greenfield, Auschwitz survivor and master tailor to American presidents, dies at 95

• Published date: 22 March 2024
• Author: ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL/JTA
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

After fixing the soldier's shirt he slipped it on under his striped prisoner uniform, and learned that just wearing a Nazi's discarded shirt — and a second one he managed to procure — gave him new status among his fellow prisoners

"The day I first wore that shirt was the day I learned clothes possess power," Greenfield wrote in his 2014 memoir, "The Measure of a Man." "Clothes don't just 'make the man,' they can save the man. They did for me."

Indeed, Greenfield would survive Auschwitz and Buchenwald, immigrate to the United States, and become a master tailor who dressed a series of presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to Barack Obama. His Brooklyn-based company crafted private-label suits for everyone from Donna Karan to Brooks Brothers to Band of Outsiders, as well as bespoke wares under his own name.

Greenfield died on Wednesday at a hospital in Manhasset, New York. He was 95.

Working out of a third-floor office in his East Williamsburg factory, Greenfield became one of the best-known — and some would say best — men's tailor in the United States. As late as 2014, when he was profiled in Vanity Fair, his suits had taken on a new cachet among customers who preferred to buy "locally sourced" wares when much of the needle trade had migrated overseas.

Less well known was his survivor's tale, a story of hardship and resilience he kept secret for decades.

"For 40 years, I didn't talk about my past to anybody . . . ever," he told Vanity Fair. "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, a survivor."

Greenfeld's biography

Maxmilian Grünfeld was born August 9, 1928, in Pavlovo, a village in what was then Czechoslovakia and is now Ukraine. At 14, he was rounded up and shipped to Auschwitz with his family: His father Joseph, his mother Tzyvia, sisters Simcha and Rivka and their baby brother, Sruel Baer. Only Martin would survive.

He was liberated at Buchenwald by the US Army in April 1945, when he got to shake hands with a future client: Eisenhower, who was the Allied commander...