November 9, 2014 – Nineteen-year-old Martin Greenfield arrived in America in 1947 with hardly a penny to his name, but he had survived the Holocaust and had acquired a valuable skill amid the brutality: he had learned to sew. Four years earlier the Nazis had taken his family from their native Czechoslovakia to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. There he was separated from his parents, sisters, and baby brother, never to see them again. Greenfield wound up in the Buchenwald camp in Germany.
He started his new life in America by sweeping floors in a New York clothing factory. He would eventually found America’s premier custom suit company, with a clientele that has included Hollywood celebrities, including Paul Newman, Jimmy Fallon, and Leonardo DiCaprio, and U.S. presidents going back to Dwight D. Eisenhower. As a boy, Greenfield shook the hand of Eisenhower, then supreme Allied commander in Europe during World War II, when the general visited Buchenwald after its liberation.
Greenfield’s amazing life story is told in his recently published memoir, “Measure of a Man.”
Link: NYPost
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