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(New York Jewish Week) — Martin Greenfield was a prisoner in Auschwitz, working within the laundry, when he by chance tore an SS soldier’s shirt. When the soldier completed flogging the teenager, Greenfield took the shirt to a different prisoner who taught him sew a easy sew.
After fixing the soldier’s shirt he slipped it on beneath his striped prisoner uniform, and discovered that simply carrying a Nazi’s discarded shirt — and a second one he managed to obtain — gave him new standing amongst his fellow prisoners.
“The day I first wore that shirt was the day I discovered garments possess energy,” Greenfield wrote in his 2014 memoir, “The Measure of a Man.” “Garments don’t simply ‘make the person,’ they will save the person. They did for me.”
Certainly, Greenfield would survive Auschwitz and Buchenwald, immigrate to the USA, and develop into a grasp tailor who dressed a collection of presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to Barack Obama. His Brooklyn-based firm crafted private-label fits for everybody from Donna Karan to Brooks Brothers to Band of Outsiders, in addition to bespoke wares beneath his personal identify.
Greenfield died on Wednesday at a hospital in Manhasset, New York. He was 95.
Understanding of a third-floor workplace in his East Williamsburg manufacturing unit, Greenfield turned one of many best-known — and a few would say finest — males’s tailor in the USA. As late as 2014, when he was profiled in Self-importance Honest, his fits had taken on a brand new cachet amongst prospects who most popular to purchase “domestically sourced” wares when a lot of the needle commerce had migrated abroad.
Much less well-known was his survivor’s story, a narrative of hardship and resilience he saved secret for many years.
“For 40 years, I didn’t speak about my previous to anyone . . . ever,” he advised Self-importance Honest. “Quite a lot of my shoppers had been shocked once they got here to a celebration after I was 80 years previous to see that I used to be a refugee, a survivor.”
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 along with his household: his father Joseph, his mom Tzyvia, sisters Simcha and Rivka and their child brother, Sruel Baer. Solely Martin would survive.
He was liberated at Buchenwald by the U.S. Military in April 1945, when he obtained to shake fingers with a future shopper: Eisenhower, who was the Allied commander. After a fruitless two-year seek for relations in Europe, Greenfield was 19 when he immigrated to the USA in 1947 and, on the advice of a fellow Czech immigrant, obtained his first job on the GGG clothes manufacturing unit in East Williamsburg.
In 1977 he would take over the corporate and rename it Martin Greenfield Clothiers, which grew from six staff on the time to 117 by 2010.
When Eisenhower, then getting ready to run for the presidency, turned a shopper, Greenfield would slip notes into his fits providing overseas coverage recommendation.
Tales about these notes turned so extensively identified that one other shopper, President Invoice Clinton, reportedly advised him, “Don’t ship me notes; you’ll be able to fax them.”
Amongst his different shoppers had been Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush; Basic Colin Powell; entertainers Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman, Leonardo DiCaprio, Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Fallon, Johnny Depp and Ben Affleck; and former New York Metropolis Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
He additionally created the fits for the Nineteen Twenties-set HBO tv present “Boardwalk Empire.”
Greenfield is survived by his spouse, Arlene, to whom he was married in 1956; two sons, Tod and Jay, and 4 grandchildren. He was a benefactor of The Hampton Synagogue on japanese Lengthy Island.
“In fact, receiving your first tailoring lesson inside a Nazi focus camp was hardly the best apprenticeship,” Greenfield recalled in his memoir. “I’d have a lot most popular to hone my craft on Savile Row or within the mills of Milan. Wanting again, although, that second within the camps marked the start of the remainder of my life. Unusually sufficient, two ripped Nazi shirts helped this Jew construct America’s most well-known and profitable customized go well with firm.
“God has a beautiful sense of a humor.”
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