Shoah survivor, the tailor to American stars and presidents Martin Greenfield has died

A survivor of the Holocaust who became the tailor to US presidents and stars, Martin Greenfield died on Wednesday aged 95, according to the New York Times, which described him as a “legend” of successful immigration to America.

Born Maximilian Grünfeld in 1928 to a wealthy Jewish family in a village in Czechoslovakia, now in Ukraine, Mr Greenfield was saved by chance from death at Auschwitz before fleeing to the United States with ten dollars in his pocket.

In New York, he ran one of the world’s most famous costume workshops and dressed thousands of famous Americans: six presidents, including the last three Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, film, music and sports stars such as Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman, Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Jackson, Kobe Bryant and even the mafioso Meyer Lansky.

He died on 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 said that “the sufferings and triumphs that Mr. Greenfield experienced are exemplary of the classic legend of immigration in America”.

As a teenage prisoner in the extermination camp, Maximilian Grünfeld was assigned to wash Nazi clothes. After inadvertently tearing the collar of a guard’s shirt, he was beaten and ordered to mend it, he recounted in 2014 in his memoirs quoted by the NYT. A prisoner taught him how to sew, so he took the shirt back and decided to keep it and slip it under his uniform. It saved his life.

“The first day I wore that shirt, I understood that clothes had power,” Greenfield wrote in Measure of a Man: From Auschwitz Survivor to Presidents’ Tailor.

He was regarded by the Nazis and his fellow prisoners as a protégé who sewed uniforms, moved freely around the camp and had access to more food.

“Two torn Nazi shirts enabled a Jew to build the best-known and most prosperous made-to-measure suit workshop in America”, he sums up in his memoirs.

A refugee in the United States in 1947, with no family, no money and not a word of English, he worked for thirty years in the garment industry in Brooklyn, taking one odd job after another and becoming a close friend of William Goldman, the boss of suit and dinner jacket manufacturer GGG.

He took over his company in 1977 and renamed it Greenfield Clothiers, which his son Tod Greenfield told the NYT is now the last workshop of its kind 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.