Her father escaped Hitler & put this SC city on a path to greatness. Now see what she has planned

After her mother died four years ago, Francie Heller started going through all the papers and documents her parents left behind.

Thousands of pages.

Her parents were Max and Trude Heller, Greenville residents who fled Austria in the 1930s as Adolph Hitler rose to power and Jews were being persecuted.

Max Heller was a transformational mayor of Greenville who ushered in the era of downtown revitalization when it was at its lowest after the decline of the area’s textile industry.

Francie Heller felt their story — encompassing the darkest of tragedies and ultimate triumph — needed to be told in full.

The result is a wide-ranging reimagining of the landscaping and addition of historical information and a new garden on the 32 acres of Greenville’s Heritage Green, which includes the Greenville County Library, Greenville County Museum of Art, Children’s Museum of the Upstate, Greenville Theatre, Upcountry History Museum and Sigal Music Museum.

Known as Heller Heritage On the Green, the project is estimated to cost $2.2 million, $500,000 of which has already been raised, and will be completed in Fall 2026.

The project also hopes to solve a longstanding hurdle for Heritage Green because of a feeling of separation from downtown Greenville. It is easily walkable from downtown but it is located at the juncture of two busy streets, one of which is a state highway.

The Hellers

Max and Trude Heller met at an Austrian resort when he was 17 years old and she was 14 years old. Smitten, he told her he’d marry her one day.

But in 1938 he came to the United States after Mary Mills, a Greenville resident he met in Vienna, interceded on his behalf with the owner of Piedmont Shirt Company Shepard Saltzman.

“Saltzman replied, ‘How can I, a Jew, refuse, when you, a Christian, is asking?’” daughter Susan Heller Moses wrote in an essay for the Jewish Historical Society of South Carolina

Max Heller arrived in Greenville with $1.60 in his pocket a few months later and began working at Saltzman’s shirt factory that day.

Trude came to the United States two years later with her mother after her father was taken away by the Nazis. It was a harrowing experience. Max and Trude had kept in touch as they could and he went to New York to visit her in 1940.

“He arrived at her door at the same moment a Western Union man delivered a telegram from Trude’s father that read, ‘I am alive.’ Since then, Trude proclaims my father to be her good luck charm” Susan Heller Moses wrote.

Max Heller eventually owned his own shirt manufacturing company, Maxon Shirts, and sold it when he was 42 to dedicate his life to public service.

He was elected to Greenville City Council then twice as mayor. In one of the many circumstances that marked the Hellers’ lives, it turned out that an ancestor of the family that owns the Hyatt Corporation came from the same Polish town as Max Heller’s mother.

The Hyatt Hotel was a central and defining part of Heller’s revitalization plan for downtown.

He ran unsuccessfully for the 4th Congressional seat in the U.S. House amid an underpinning of antisemitism.

He then served as chairman of the State Development Board under Gov. Dick Riley.

Max Heller died in 2011 at 92. He and Trude had been married for 69 years, parents of three children and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Trude called the large family their answer to Hitler. She spent many years educating people about the Holocaust. Between them, the Hellers lost 90 relatives. After the war, they looked for family members and found two.

As grim as their history, Mrs. Heller’s message was one of hope, kindness, and respect.

“When asked by a young boy what he should say to people who said the Holocaust did not happen, she replied, ‘Tell them you met me,’ her family said in her obituary.

She also served on the Greenville Symphony Guild, Metropolitan Arts Council, and Greenville Hospital Guild and was instrumental in the development of the International Baccalaureate Program for the School District of Greenville County.

She died in 2021 at 98.

Heller Heritage on the Green

Francie Heller said she began meeting with the directors of the six cultural institutions two years ago to forge a plan to honor her parents.

Each institution is its own agency, the land is owned by Greenville County and they are in the city limits of Greenville.

There were many parameters to meet — can’t change the sidewalks, no benches, all sorts of underground utilities — but Heller and the institution leaders managed through it all.

She often thought — and thinks — what would my father do? He was a man who brought people together.

The plan includes a garden at the Children’s Museum honoring her mother and the donation of Heller papers and memorabilia to the History Museum, which intends to create an interactive exhibit.

A “Dear Mrs. Heller” exhibit will feature Trude Heller’s correspondence with the thousands of people she spoke to about the Holocaust.

The steps leading up to the area from the sidewalk will be a mosaic depiction of the Hellers’ lives. And there will be panels throughout the walkway with quotes Heller often said, such as, “I believe in miracles, I just don’t depend on them.”

“It’s a real labor of love,” Francie Heller said.

This story was originally published June 3, 2025 at 6:00 AM.