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Jane Haining
38 Jane Haining
Righteous Among the Nations
Righteous Among the Nations
The handwritten will of a Scottish woman who died in Auschwitz
after refusing to abandon Jewish girls in her care at a mission-
ary school in Budapest, was discovered in church archives.
Jane Haining is the only Scot named as “righteous among the
nations” – non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from
the Nazis – by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial.
Her will, which bequeaths “money left after meeting fu-
neral expenses” along with her wireless, typewriter, fur coat and
watches, was found in a box in the archives of the Church of Scotland’s World Mission Council in Ed-
inburgh. The box also held about 70 photographs of Haining with her young charges, and documents
revealing efforts to secure her release from the Nazi death camp.
Rev Ian Alexander, secretary of the World Mission Council, said Haining’s
story was “one of heroism and personal sacrifice”. The discovery of a will “gives
a sense she was fully aware of the risks she was taking”, he said. “Scottish
missionaries were advised to return home from Europe during the dark days
of the second world war, but Jane declined and wrote: ‘If these children need
me in days of sunshine, how much more do they need me in days of darkness?
Haining moved to Budapest in the early 1930s to work as a matron in a
church-run school after a sheltered childhood on a farm and 10 years working
as a secretary. Many of the 315 pupils at the school were girls from the city’s
growing Jewish population. In 1939, when war broke out, Haining was on hol-
iday in Cornwall but immediately returned to Budapest and her charges. A year
later she was ordered by the church to return to Scotland, but refused.
A Hungarian bishop, László Ravasz, later reported that “her superiors three times ordered her
home, but she always replied that the Hungarian people were so true-hearted, honourable and chival-
rous that among them not a hair on her head would be touched. ‘I shall continue to do my duty,’ she
declared, ‘and stick to my post.’”
When Nazi troops entered Budapest in March 1944, she again rejected entreaties to leave, in-
stead sewing yellow stars on to the clothes of Jewish girls on Gestapo orders. Within weeks, the
Gestapo arrested her on suspicion of spying, giving her 15 minutes to gather her belongings. Haining
was charged with eight offences, including listening to news broadcasts on the BBC.
By May she was in Auschwitz, working in the labour camps, and by August she was dead. Her
British citizenship meant the Nazis sent a death certificate to the Church of Scotland; it said Haining
had died of “cachexia following intestinal catarrh”. More than a million people died in the Auschwitz
concentration camps before they were liberated by Russian troops in January 1945.
Jane Haining’s Hero of the Holocaust. As well as being honoured by Yad
Vashem in 1997, after a 10-year investigation, Haining was posthumously
awarded a Hero of the Holocaust medal by the UK government in 2010. Two
glass windows bear tribute to her “service and sacrifice” at her former church
in Queen’s Park, Glasgow. A street in Budapest is named after her.
Rev Susan Brown of the World Mission Council said: “The previously un-
seen documents and photographs have, for me, evoked fresh feelings of awe
about this already tremendously moving, inspiring and important story. To hear
of Jane’s determination to continue to care for ‘her’ girls, even when she knew it put
her own life at risk, is truly humbling.”
ED - the above is just one of the forgotten or unknown heroes that I would like to pinch the odd
page or two to give them some publicity. I have the usual heroes, Nelson, Winston Churchill, Florence
Nightingale etc. Most of the others I will try to include are women as they have often fought the hardest
battles. I hope you will all understand. when I pinch the odd page?