“Two ripped Nazi shirts,” Martin Greenfield once said, “helped this Jew build America’s most famous and successful custom-suit company.” Greenfield, who died on Wednesday, was once known as Maximilian Grünfeld, “a skinny Jewish prisoner whose job was to wash the clothes of Nazi guards” at Auschwitz. The story of his life afterward “exemplified the classic tale of immigration to America,” writes Alex Traub.
He was finally freed in 1945 by America soldiers.
General Eisenhower himself toured the camp, unaware that a teenage prisoner there would one day become his tailor. In his memoir, Mr. Greenfield recalled thinking that Eisenhower, an ordinary 5-foot-10, was 10 feet tall.
After that, he made his way to America, changed his name to Martin Greenfield to sound “all-American,” learned to make suits, eventually built the last surviving union clothing business in New York City, and was named “America’s best tailor by GQ, Vanity Fair, and CNN.”
Over the decades, he made suits for Gerald R. Ford, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Donald J. Trump, Joseph R. Biden, Colin Powell, Ed Koch, Michael R. Bloomberg, Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman, Martin Scorsese, Denzel Washington, Michael Jackson, Lebron James, and Leonardo DiCaprio, among many others.
On his first day in Auschwitz, Max’s father, Joseph, told him that he was more likely to survive if they separated, Mr. Greenfield wrote in his memoir. The next day, the camp guards asked which prisoners had skills. Joseph grabbed Max’s wrist, thrust the boy’s hand in the air and announced, “A4406”—Max’s tattooed inmate number. “He is a mechanic. Very skilled.”
Two German soldiers hauled Max away. He did not see his father again.
Before they parted, Joseph said to Max, “If you survive, you live for us.”
The rest of Mr. Greenfield’s life was an attempt to follow that commandment, his son Tod said: “And that’s what he did.”
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