Measure of a Man: From Auschwitz Survivor to Presidents' Tailor

"In 1956, Martin Greenfield was a twentysomething Czech immigrant working as a tailor at the well-regarded Brooklyn suit maker GGG Clothes. Greenfield had gotten in the door, in 1947, with the help of a fellow immigrant friend and eventually worked his way from the lowly post of 'floor boy' to trusted confidante of owner William P. Goldman, who took a shine to his competitive spirit. GGG was a favorite label of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the young tailor couldn't help himself from passing advice on foreign policy to the Oval Office via the pockets of the president's new suits. If Eisenhower wanted to end the Suez Canal crisis, Greenfield suggested in a note, why not give Secretary of State John Dulles a two-week vacation? Eisenhower eventually shared his tailor's hubris with the D.C. press corps for a few laughs. The anecdote is one of many in Greenfield's new memoir that demonstrates the extraordinary experience he had with capital-H history in the back half of the 20th century ."-- Vanity Fair "It's a remarkable book."--Nationally syndicated radio host Mark Levin "I dare you to read Holocaust survivor Martin Greenfield's story and not burst into tears. [...] Every once in a while a book is written that you'll never forget, and leaves you telling all your family and friends about. Martin Greenfield's Measure of a Man: From Auschwitz Survivor to Presidents' Tailor is one of those books."--The Daily Surge From the Inside Flap The first time Martin Greenfield took up needle and thread was at Auschwitz, to mend the shirt of the SS guard who had just beaten him. Today, he is recognized as "America's greatest living tailor," the man who dresses presidents and movie stars. Measure of a Man is Greenfield's story. More than an unforgettable account of survival and triumph, it's the testimony of a man who came of age amid the darkest evil in modern history but never lost hope.The Nazis came for the Jews in Greenfield's Carpathian village in 1944. Separated from his parents and siblings as soon as they arrived at Auschwitz, Martin was the only one of his family to survive the Holocaust. "Where was God?" he asked the rabbi who arrived with Eisenhower's liberating army a yearlater at Buchenwald.Greenfield arrived in America in 1947, nineteen years old and penniless. He went to work as a floor boy at a Brooklyn clothing factory and quickly became a virtuoso tailor, making suits for the president and the biggest names in Hollywood. Within thirty years he owned the firm.His insistence on the highest standards, his humility, and his humor have made Martin Greenfield the clothier—and inevitably the friend—of many of the greatest legends of American politics, entertainment, and sports. He has passed foreign policy advice to Eisenhower on notes tucked into his suit pockets, encouraged a disillusioned Paul Newman on the brink of abandoning his acting career, and coaxed both Bill Clinton and Carmelo Anthony into tails.Throughout his long and improbable career, Greenfield has never lost his sense of gratitude for the country that plucked him out of hell and enabled him to build a new home and family. "America is dreams," he writes. "In Yiddish, we have a proverb—'Heaven and hell can both be had in this world.' But America is the only place I know that lets you turn your hell into a heaven. It did for me." The first time Martin Greenfield took up needle and thread was at Auschwitz, to mend the shirt of the SS guard who had just beaten him. Today, he is recognized as "America's greatest living tailor," the man who dresses presidents and movie stars. Measure of a Man is Greenfield's story. More than an unforgettable account of survival and triumph, it's the testimony of a man who came of age amid the darkest evil in modern history but never lost hope. The Nazis came for the Jews in Greenfield's Carpathian village in 1944. Separated from his parents and siblings as soon as they arrived at Auschwitz, Martin was the only one of his family to survive the Holocaust. "Where was God?" he asked the rabbi who arrived with Eisenhower's liberating army a yearlater at Buchenwald. Greenfield arrived in America in 1947, nineteen years old and penniless. He went to work as a floor boy at a Brooklyn clothing factory and quickly became a virtuoso tailor, making suits for the president and the biggest names in Hollywood. Within thirty years he owned the firm. His insistence on the highest standards, his humility, and his humor have made Martin Greenfield the clothier--and inevitably the friend--of many of the greatest legends of American politics, entertainment, and sports. He has passed foreign policy advice to Eisenhower on notes tucked into his suit pockets, encouraged a disillusioned Paul Newman on the brink of abandoning his acting career, and coaxed both Bill Clinton and Carmelo Anthony into tails. Throughout his long and improbable career, Greenfield has never lost his sense of gratitude for the country that plucked him out of hell and enabled him to build a new home and family. "America is dreams," he writes. "In Yiddish, we have a proverb--'Heaven and hell can both be had in this world.' But America is the only place I know that lets you turn your hell into a heaven. It did for me." The list of Regnery authors reads like a "who's who" of conservative thought, action, and history. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. From Chapter Two: Inside Auschwitz Day and night the ovens burned. The smoke spewed up from the soaring brick chimney and belched the vaporous remnants of corpses into the air. At night you could see the flames spitting against the blackened sky. Still, no one in the camps talked to me about the crematoria. Whether that was because I was just a boy or because I no longer had a father by my side to speak piercing truths to me, I do not know. But I could smell that something was horribly wrong.After morning roll call, we were given something approximating black coffee. To be sick or weak was dangerous, so no matter how rancid the gruel or vile the smell, I forced myself to eat. The afternoon slop was usually some sort of soup that frequently had human hair, trash, or dead insects floating in it. Sundown brought black bread mixed with sawdust. Soup made you skinny. Bread made strength. So I ate as much bread as I could scavenge and always tried to cover my wounds with my clothes.My labor assignment in the laundry lasted several days before I was moved to the sorting room, which housed the confiscated wares of newly arrived prisoners. The space was filled with fifty or so prisoners combing and sifting mountains of clothes, shoes, and other possessions. Sometimes a prisoner stumbled upon a hidden morsel of food folded inside a bag or tucked inside a coat pocket. Prisoners caught trying to sneak a bite were promptly whipped by a kapo, who often smuggled the food or ate it himself.Between the rummaging and sorting I peeked over and around piles every chance I got in the hopes of spotting a family member. That’s all I wanted: one glimpse, a single fleeting confirmation they were still alive. But it never came. Looking back now I realize that false, cruel wish, like an invisible ladder whose rungs materialized based on hope, compelled me to reach for survival.The weeks passed and the piles got smaller and smaller until transports of new prisoners slowed to a trickle. The Nazis reassigned me to the bricklaying teams. Allied bombs were busting up brick buildings everywhere, so our services were in high demand. I knew nothing about masonry. A prisoner who served as a team leader stuck a trowel in my one hand and a mortar bucket in the other before walking me to a block of bricks. There I learned the finer points of bricklaying before being put to work.The work was hard and the days were long, and my wire-thin teenage frame did its best to keep up with the older, stronger men. For some reason, slathering and smoothing the mortar across the faces of the bricks made my thoughts float to Pavlovo and brought back scenes of Grandma Geitel icing freshly baked cakes. Before long I had perfected my ability to detach my mind from my physical form, and my body sped up as my thoughts slowed down.Even so, no matter how hard we worked, our captors would slay prisoners without provocation.Killings were frequent and random. One day a boy from my block and I were tasked with building a brick wall. We started just after morning line up. By late afternoon we had completed a good stretch of the wall and felt a certain pride in our accomplishment. We stacked the bricks higher and higher until it stood some five or six feet tall. We talked while working to unclench our minds. A single gunshot rang out, but I didn’t think much of it. The crack of rifle fire and the spraying of machineguns were common, so I kept stacking and talking. I asked the boy a question and got no reply.I asked again.Silence.I swiveled my head in his direction. Several yards away, the boy lay motionless, facedown in the dirt inside an expanding pool of blood. I later learned a Nazi had used the boy for target practice.At home in Pavlovo—and in most civilizations—a clear moral order structured our daily lives. Hard work, justice, fairness, integrity—these virtues produced predictable fruits. But not in the concentration camps. The Germans killed for any reason or none at all. It was futile to try to discern their logic, because there was none. If a Nazi was angry, he might kill you. If a Nazi was happy, he might kill you. It made no difference.The dehumanizing randomness of the murders suffocated my sense of hope, just as Hitler and his henchmen had intended. What appeared random was, in fact, not random at all. It was a systematic psychological lynching, a strangling of the human heart’s need to believe in the rewards of goodness, a snapping of the moral hinge on which humanity swings. Soon, and much to my shame, I became anesthetized to death, numb to depravity. Some primal survival switch inside me had been temporarily flicked on that allowed me to submerge the emotions generated by the evil scorching my eyes.I witnessed dozens of shootings and helped carry scores of corpses. Sometimes a dead body would be intact and appear to be sleeping. Other times a bullet would rip through a prisoner spilling out organs. Or shatter a skull, exposing chunks of brain. But as the days passed, no matter its condition, a body soon became just a body, a sallow, bloodless, gangling object that must be lugged, heaved atop a pile, or dropped in a hole.At fifteen, I had become an undertaker. Read more