Martin Greenfield is one of the world's most respected and accomplished tailors. Since emigrating from the former Czechoslovakia to America in 1947, he has dressed everyone from the Rat Pack and Leonardo DiCaprio to Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Barack Obama.

But Greenfield's success follows tremendous adversity. As a teenager, he survived two horrific years in concentration camps during the Holocaust, and lost his parents and siblings at the hands of the Nazis. In this excerpt from his memoir Measure of a Man , Greenfield describes how an encounter with an SS guard at Auschwitz led him to pick up a needle and thread for the first time, and how tragedy taught him the power of clothes.