The bus ride from Buchenwald to Prague felt surreal. I stared out the window and watched the German towns and countryside race past my face and recede from my mind. I had to make a mental break. I had to bury the childhood innocence that died an agonizing death in Auschwitz, Buna, Gleiwitz, and Buchenwald. I was sixteen. I had seen more death and destruction than a hundred civilian men combined. My father had told me if I survived I must honor our family, not by feeling guilty, but by living life to the fullest. I would not disobey Father. In fact, I did him one better: I signed up to fight the tyranny that had taken my family from me.
We stepped off the bus at Prague and experienced a registration line far different from the ones the Nazis administered. Instead of shaving our heads and stealing our clothes,they gave us medical attention and plenty of civilian food. I had processing papers from the Buchenwald camp but chose not to show them. Instead, I told the registrars I was eighteen years old and wanted to enlist in the Czechoslovakian army. They were unwilling to take me when they saw my weakened condition. But after I had rested and healed in the local sanitarium for several weeks, I was signed up and shipped off for a couple months of basic training. The army issued me a uniform. The fabric, the styling, the angular military cut and silhouette—I beamed every time I wore it. It made me look and feel like a man, like someone my family would be proud to call their son. I had finally reached that moment of maturity every boy passes through on the way to adulthood when he embraces, not rejects, wearing a suit. You can always tell when a boy has reached manhood by the clothes hanging in his closet.
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I liked wearing a suit so much I decided I needed a civilian suit or two of my own. On one occasion our unit was sent on a quick mission to Germany. During the trip we stumbled upon a textile warehouse packed with bolts of fabric. I knew nothing about weave and thread counts, so I chose four large cuts that looked handsome and felt nice between my fingers. When we returned to Czechoslovakia, I took the four pieces of fabric to a tailor in the city. I told him I would give him two cuts of cloth if he would take the other two and make me two suits. He agreed, measured me up, and made me two simple suits. I was building a young man’s beginner wardrobe. For what, I wasn’t sure. But if I’d learned anything in the camps, I’d learned that what you wore could change your life.
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The war effort was dying down, and the army discharged me after a few short months of service. They let me keep my uniform. I was proud of that uniform and to have served my country in it. But it proved useful on another level as well. Every time I traveled and wore my uniform, girls noticed it. More important, Russian soldiers respected it—not me, but the suit and what it represented.
Excerpt from “Measure of a Man: A Memoir, From Auschwitz Survivor to Presidents’ Tailor” by Martin Greenfield with Wynton Hall. Copyright (c) 2014 and reprinted by permission of Regnery Publishing.