Max Heller: The Refugee Who Rebuilt Downtown

In nineteen thirty-seven, a young Austrian Jewish man named Max Heller was attending business school in Vienna when he met five young women from Greenville, South Carolina, at an outdoor cafe. He asked one of them to dance. Less than a year later, Adolf Hitler's forces moved into Austria, and that small encounter across an ocean would save his life.

As conditions for Jewish families in Vienna became dangerous and then deadly, Heller wrote to one of those women, Mary Mills, asking for help. She brought his letter to Shepard Saltzman, owner of Piedmont Shirt Company in Greenville. Saltzman's reply has been quoted for decades. How can I, a Jew, refuse, when you, a Christian, is asking? He sponsored Heller's immigration. Max Heller arrived in Greenville in nineteen thirty-eight, eighteen years old, and began working at the shirt factory. Between him and his future wife Trude, who also fled Austria, they would lose ninety family members in the Holocaust.

Heller built a successful career in the garment industry. Then he retired early and ran for public office. He served two terms as mayor of Greenville from nineteen seventy-one to nineteen seventy-nine. What he did in those years reshaped the physical and social character of the city.

Heller hired urban planner Lawrence Halprin to redesign Main Street: two lanes instead of four, wide sidewalks, young trees, diagonal parking, decorative crosswalks. He desegregated City Hall. He worked to improve housing conditions for Greenville's lowest-income residents. The Hyatt Regency opened in nineteen eighty-two, the first major downtown hotel investment in decades, a direct consequence of the infrastructure Heller put in place.

City leaders call him the father of modern Greenville. He died in two thousand eleven at the age of ninety-two. The man who arrived here because a stranger chose generosity over hesitation ended up transforming the city that saved him.