Oral history interview with Max Moses Heller and Trude Schonthal Heller, 1997.

ArchivalResource

Rosengarten, Dale, 1948-. Oral history interview with Max Moses Heller and Trude Schonthal Heller, 1997.

Oral history interview with Max Moses Heller and Trude Schonthal Heller, 1997.

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/48880433

In this interview, the Hellers tell their individual stories of growing up in Vienna, meeting nearby, and escaping with their families after the Anschluss of 1938, to the United States, where they eventually married in 1944. In 1937 Max Heller met Mary Miller, a girl from Greenville, South Carolina, in Vienna, and corresponded with her. She contacted Shep Saltzman who sponsored Heller's immigration in 1938 to Greenville, SC, where Heller worked in a shirt factory and eventually was joined by his parents, Leah Hirschl and Israel Heller. Trude Heller and her family survived Kristalnacht, smuggled themselves out of Austria and Germany, and eventually she and her parents, Rosa Haas and Simon (Schmiek) Schonthall arrived in New York City. Both interviewees discuss growing up in Vienna in unassimilated Jewish circles, the antisemitism they met in Europe, and their courtship and marriage and life in Greenville, South Carolina, where Heller, a successful businessman, became city council member and later mayor (1971-1979). They discuss the changes made in Greenville during his tenure, their loyalty to the city, the antisemitism that tainted his unsuccessful run for Congress and other subjects, such as the late twentieth century interest in the Holocaust after years of silence.

Sound recording : 1 south cassette.Transcript : 32 p. ; 28 cm.

College of Charleston, Marlene and Nathan Addlestone Library