Martin Greenfield, tailor who learnt his craft in Auschwitz and later dressed presidents – obituary

Martin Greenfield, who has died aged 95, became a master tailor, working for numerous celebrities and US presidents, from Eisenhower to Obama, after arriving in New York as a teenage survivor of Auschwitz.

In 2014 he told his story in Measure of a Man, in which he recounted how he had learnt the rudiments of his craft in the death camp.

The son of an industrial engineer, he was born Maximilian Grünfeld on August 9 1928 in Pavlovo, a village in Czechoslovakia (now in Ukraine). After the German invasion of Czechoslovakia he was sent to Budapest where he spent a couple of years living in a brothel.

On his return home, he, his parents, brother and two sisters were forced on to a train to Auschwitz. There, the notorious camp doctor Josef Mengele sent Max and his father to the right, to work, and his mother and siblings were sent to the left, and their immediate death.

Two days later, a camp guard asked whether any prisoners had skills. His father grabbed Max’s hand and thrust it into the air, claiming that his son was a mechanic. As Max was taken away, his father whispered to him: “If you survive, you live for us.” He later discovered that his father been shot and killed a week before liberation.

Max was sent to work in the camp laundry and repair shop where, one day, he accidentally ripped the collar of a shirt belonging to an SS officer – an offence for which he was whipped.

But he got to keep the shirt and, after mending it, put it on under his striped camp uniform. The effect was startling. Other prisoners – and even guards – began treating him with respect, apparently assuming that he had, for whatever reason, been singled out for favourable treatment.

In January 1945, as Soviet forces approached, Max was forced to join the “Death March” to Gleiwitz. He recalled marching with an open mouth to catch snowflakes to drink, and the sound of gun shots as SS men killed those who could not keep up.

He ended up in Buchenwald where, one day, he and other prisoners were taken to nearby Weimar to repair damage caused by allied bombing. There, he and a friend found a hutch with two rabbits at the home of the mayor, but were spotted by the mayor’s wife stealing the animals’ food and endured a savage beating.

On the day the camp was liberated, Max confronted a young rabbi, a US Army chaplain, and asked him: “Where was God?” The rabbi could find no answer. The next day Max went to Weimar, intending to kill the mayor’s wife, but when he saw her with a baby in her arms he could not go through with it. At that moment, he recalled, he “became human again”.

Max returned to Czechoslovakia. Two years later, an uncle helped him cross the Atlantic, and a fellow Czech immigrant arranged a lowly job as a “floor boy” in a Brooklyn garment factory.

He changed his name to the “more American” Martin Greenfield, and resolved “to be the best, to stand out. Hand-basting, darting, piping, facing and lining, blind stitching, pressing, armhole work, joker tags, fell stitching, preparing besoms, finishing – I would learn how to execute every procedure better than the person who taught me.”

He worked his way up from tailor to supervisor to head quality man, and by 1977 he had amassed enough skill and capital to buy the factory. Renamed Martin Greenfield Clothiers, by 2010 it had grown from six employees to 117.

It made ready-to-wear suits for department stores like Neiman Marcus and for brands like Brooks Brothers and Donna Karan, but became best known for made-to-measure suits for individual customers, including Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Colin Powell, Frank Sinatra and Paul Newman. Other commissions included hand-tailoring 250 period 1920s costumes for the HBO series Boardwalk Empire.

In 1956 Greenfield married Arlene Bergen, who survives him with two sons.

Martin Greenfield, born August 9 1928, died March 20 2024