Measure of a Man
Copyright © 2014 by Martin Greenfield
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ISBN 978-1-62157-276-3
Published in the United States by
Regnery Publishing
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Beautiful People
CHAPTER NINE
The Tailors’ Tailor
CHAPTER TEN
Dressing Presidents and Politicians
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Suit Maker to the Stars
CHAPTER TWELVE
Bar Mitzvah at Eighty
For the family I lost and love
.
(BLESSED BE HE WHO GIVES LIFE TO THE DEAD.)
T
hey say a man’s shoes are the first thing a person notices.
I can still see his in my mind. Leather boots, dark like night, shining like mirrors. I’d never seen such shoes. In the tiny town of Pavlovo, Czechoslovakia, where I grew up, everyone had a farm, so boots were worn. But not shiny boots, not like these.
Shooting up and out the tops of his boots were billowy pants, no crease. His crisp shirt was tucked flat under his belt. A tightly tailored jacket covered in shiny buttons and pins drew my eyes up to his dark, smoothed-back hair. His elegant, calm face framed the gleaming monocle in his eye.
I did not yet know that this was the man called the “Angel of Death.” I did not know that Dr. Josef Mengele was the Nazi physician who performed amputations without anesthesia, plucked out
and collected blue eyeballs, tossed live babies into crackling fires, and gave twin girls candies before shooting them in the neck and using their corpses for medical experimentation.
I knew none of these things. How could I know? I was a fifteen-year-old boy. All I knew, standing in that line at Auschwitz, was that my father, Joseph Grünfeld; my mother, Tzyvia; my sisters, Simcha and Rivka; my five-year-old baby brother, Sruel Baer; and I, Maximilian, were in trouble and far from home.
I will tell you how we ended up at Auschwitz. In April 1944, on the second day of Passover, the Germans and Hungarians surrounded the Jewish homes in our village and gave us an hour to pack whatever we could carry. We came out into the street, were marched six miles, packed into cattle cars, and transported on a train to Mukačevo (then in Hungary, now in southwestern Ukraine). Just that fast.
The train chugged for twelve miles until we arrived at Mukačevo. The worst part was the imagining, the not knowing. Sometimes, when I let myself go back to Mukačevo in my mind, I wonder what thoughts and feelings must have been pulsing through my parents. Did they know the fate about to befall us? Had they hatched a plan in case our family got separated? Were they putting on a brave face for Simcha, Rivka, Sruel Baer, and me? Or did they think our time in the ghetto would be temporary, that we would go home after the war?
So many questions I still have. So many things I cannot know.
When we got to Mukačevo, the Germans herded us into a big building that housed a brick factory. The Germans had built
wooden barracks all around the structure. Our family was actually lucky to be inside, because other Jewish families had to stay in tents when the barracks were full.
Even though we were in the ghetto only about a month, I was always thinking about our beautiful town of Pavlovo. You never saw a happier town than Pavlovo. We lived in the sweeping Carpathian Mountains, just a few miles from the Hungarian border. The Grünfeld family was well known and respected. My grandfather, Abraham, built our village’s only synagogue. The fifty or so Jewish families that worshipped there were like one big family. On
Shabbat
(the Sabbath) we all gathered together. Everyone brought fresh vegetables grown from his garden, homemade breads, plum brandy, and the choicest wines. We were a tightknit little town. It was a beautiful life.
Dad’s job as an industrial engineer meant he traveled almost every week. Sometimes during school breaks he would take me with him. We would sleep in tents on the job site, fish in the streams, and eat in the fields with the workers. I treasured those trips.
With Dad gone a lot, childrearing was mostly left up to my mother. She raised us well. We had our own farm, cows, and chickens and workers to take care of our land. Everything was grown fresh. Everything was our own. We used lamps and stoves for light and heat. We spoke Yiddish in our home and learned Czech in our school. When the adults didn’t want us to hear something, they spoke Hungarian.
We were Orthodox but not fanatical. My parents were not nearly as religious as my mother’s parents, Geitel and Fischel Berger, who lived with us. When I was three, my mother took me
to
heder
(religious school). Because I was the oldest, she wanted me to set a good example for my siblings. I wanted so much to be a good example to them.
But none of that meant anything now. All that was over and done. We were in the Mukačevo ghetto waiting and worrying. My father was appointed a ghetto leader. He made sure families stayed together and mouths were fed. He was even free to walk in and out of the ghetto gates. He could have fled but didn’t.
No one inside the ghetto spoke of corpses and crematoria. If they thought such things, they did not speak of them, at least not to me or my brother and sisters.
Of course, already I knew the Nazis were bad. At Mukačevo I watched as three Gestapo officers wrestled my grandfather to the floor so a fourth could cut off his long, beautiful beard after he refused to shave it.
“No!” cried my grandfather. “That is my strength!”
Still, they cut it.
Such images from youth never leave the mind.
Time spent with Abraham was always an adventure. My grandfather was so big, so strong. He trained white Arabian horses. In the winter he’d hook the horses to a sleigh and pull me through the snow, the horse bells tinkling all the way. Other memories were not so idyllic. Like the time I hit my head on a stable beam while riding a horse. My grandfather bandaged my head, lifted me back on the horse, and folded my hands around the reins. It was his way of teaching me to overcome fear. Today when I see the scar in the mirror, it makes me smile.