(New York) Survivor of the Shoah and become the tailor of presidents and stars in the United States, Martin Greenfield died Wednesday at the age of 95, announced the New York Times who sees him as a “legend” of successful immigration to America.
Born Maximilian Grünfeld in 1928 to a wealthy Jewish family in Czechoslovakia (now Ukraine), Mr. Greenfield was accidentally saved from death at Auschwitz before fleeing to the United States, with ten dollars in his pocket.
In New York, he ran one of the most renowned costume making workshops on the planet and dressed thousands of famous Americans: six presidents, including the last three Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, movie stars , music and sports like Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman, Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Jackson, Kobe Bryant and even mobster Meyer Lansky.
He died Wednesday in a hospital on Long Island, east of New York, according to his son Tod Greenfield who told the NYT.
In its obituary, the newspaper called “the sufferings and triumphs of Mr. Greenfield exemplary of the classic legend of immigration to America.”
As a teenage prisoner in the extermination camp, Maximilian Grünfeld was assigned to the Nazi clothes laundromat.
After accidentally tearing the collar of a guard’s shirt, he was beaten and ordered to repair it, he recounted in 2014 in his memoirs cited by the NYT.
A prisoner teaches him to sew, he takes the shirt and decides to keep it and slip it under his uniform.
This saves his life.
“The first day I wore that shirt, I realized that clothes have power,” Greenfield writes in Measure of a Man: From Auschwitz Survivor to Presidents’ Tailor.
He is then considered by the Nazis and his fellow prisoners as a protégé who sews uniforms, moves freely around the camp and has access to more food.
“Two torn Nazi shirts allowed a Jew to build the most famous and successful custom suit workshop in America,” he summarizes in his memoirs.
A refugee in the United States in 1947, without family or money and without a word of English, he worked for thirty years in the garment industry in Brooklyn, doing odd jobs, becoming close friends with the boss of the suit and tuxedo manufacturer GGG, William Goldman. .
He took over his business in 1977 which he renamed Greenfield Clothiers, which according to his son Tod Greenfield at NYT is now the last workshop of its type in New York.
The 50 employees work on manual machines and it takes them ten hours to make a suit that will dress a politician or a star.