An Auschwitz survivor who went on to become a tailor for clients including six US presidents, Frank Sinatra and Leonardo DiCaprio has died aged 95.
As a teenager, Martin Greenfield was imprisoned at the concentration camp where he washed the guards’ clothes.
After he was beaten for accidentally ripping a shirt, a fellow prisoner taught him to sew.
In 1945, at the age of 19, he was freed. He boarded a ship to New York with just $10 in his pocket.
He later became arguably the best men’s tailor in the United States.
Born Maximilian Grunfeld to a Jewish family from a part of Czechoslovakia that is now in Ukraine, he was sent to Auschwitz as a teenager.
Mending the shirt opened up a new world for him. He wore it underneath his uniform, and found he was able to move more freely because it was mistakenly thought to signify special privileges.
“The day I first wore that shirt was the day I learned clothes possess power,” he wrote in his memoir Measure of a Man: From Auschwitz Survivor to Presidents’ Tailor.
At the end of World War Two, Greenfield travelled to the US and found a job at a Brooklyn clothing factory.
Three decades later he bought the factory, naming it after himself.
Greenfield became one of the most renowned tailors in America, dressing six presidents including Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden.
He also became the go-to for some of the biggest names in sport and showbiz, including Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson, Denzel Washington and Kobe Bryant.
He eventually passed the company on to two of his sons, whom he had with his wife Arlene, who survives him.
In an Instagram tribute, his sons wrote: “Martin Greenfield survived the atrocities of the Holocaust with his humanity intact, living his life delighted to meet everyone he encountered with his infectious smile.”
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