Jane Haining

Jane Mathison Haining (6 June 1897 – 17 July 1944) was a Scottish missionary for the Church of Scotland in Budapest, Hungary, who was recognised in 1997 by Yad Vashem in Israel as Righteous Among the Nations for having risked her life to help Jews during the Holocaust.

Bishop László Ravasz told the Scottish Mission in 1946 that he had tried to obtain support for Haining from Admiral Miklós Horthy, the Regent of Hungary, who, Ravasz said, "learned of the case with deep regret and assured me of his sympathy for the Church of Scotland and all her workers". Ravasz also spoke to or met with the State Secretary Miklos Mester and the Hungarian prime minister, who, at the time of Haining's arrest, was Döme Sztójay. Ravasz understood that the prime minister had instructed an under-secretary to seek Haining's release, but Ravasz received no further reply to his inquiries. constituting almost the entire Jewish population of Hungary's countryside. Deportees were taken in Hungarian trains to the Slovak border, then transferred to German trains to be taken to southern Poland, a journey of about two days. Squeezed into the wagons in horrendous conditions, with little air, light, food or water, with buckets for latrines and no privacy, many people died during the journey. Gertrud "Trude" Levi was deported from Hungary to Auschwitz in 1944:

From May 1944 the trains into Auschwitz II arrived on a new train spur that had been built to carry the Hungarian Jews directly into the camp. The three-track line, which stopped near the gas chambers, meant that a new train could arrive while a previous one was being unloaded. The crematoria could barely cope; the Sonderkommando (prisoners forced to work there) had to start burning bodies in open fire pits. About 90 per cent of the Hungarian Jews who survived the journey to Auschwitz were sent to the gas chambers on arrival; the rest were selected for slave labour.

Haining's deportation, final letter

According to the Polish historian Danuta Czech, Haining was deported to Auschwitz II on 15 May 1944. According to David McDougall, she was taken to Auschwitz along with 90 other prisoners from the Kistarcsa transit camp. One former pupil said that many of the Jewish girls from the Scottish mission also ended up in Auschwitz; a few survived.

Selected for work rather than the gas chamber, Haining was given the serial number 79467 and probably had the number tattooed on her arm. She sent a postcard from Auschwitz, written in German, to Margit Prém of the mission school. (The card was forwarded on 1 August 1956 to the Church of Scotland's Department of World Mission.) Postmarked "Auschwitz, Oberschlesien", 21 July 1944, one side is headed "Konzentrationslager Auschwitz" ("Auschwitz concentration camp") and lists the rules for corresponding with prisoners. The other side is dated 15 July 1944, written in pencil:

Death According to a death certificate that arrived in Edinburgh on 17 August 1944, Haining died in hospital, presumably in Auschwitz, on 17 July 1944, two days after the date written in pencil on her card to Margit Prém. Delivered courtesy of the German legation in Budapest and the Swiss government, the death certificate stated: "Miss Haining who was arrested on account of justified suspicion of espionage against Germany, died in hospital, July 17th, of cachexia following intestinal catarrh." Her death was probably as a result of starvation and the camp's catastrophic living conditions. and is on display in the mission building. Some of her belongings were found in 2016 in the attic space of the Church of Scotland's head office in George Street, Edinburgh. They included her handwritten will, dated July 1942, and over 70 photographs of the girls in the mission school. The items were placed in the National Library of Scotland.

Memorials

Little was known about Auschwitz when Haining died. Robertson writes that a 1944 Church of Scotland report stated that she had been sent to a "detention camp for women in Auschwitz in Upper Silesia", and her family's tombstone in the Irongray churchyard near Castle Douglas placed her death in Germany. The Scottish Mission in Budapest unveiled a memorial tablet for her in 1946. In June 1948 two stained glass windows in her honour were installed in the vestibule of Queen's Park Govanhill Parish Church in Glasgow, where she worshipped.

On 27 January 1997—International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 52nd anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz—Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, recognised Haining as Righteous Among the Nations. Her name is inscribed on a wall of honour in the Garden of the Righteous in Jerusalem. The honour is awarded to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. Twenty-two British people had been recognised as of January 2018. Haining was the second Scot; Tommy Noble, a Scottish POW, was made Righteous Among the Nations in 1988.

Other memorials to Haining include a cairn near Dunscore Church, made possible in 2005 by public donation, and a Church of Scotland "Jane Haining prize", which arranges an annual visit to Scotland for a Hungarian teacher and two students. In 2016, a memorial event attended by former pupils of the mission school was held in Hungary and in 2017 Haining was again honoured by the city of Budapest in a new exhibition at its Holocaust Memorial Centre.

Karine Polwart, the Scottish singer-songwriter, wrote a song about Haining entitled "Baleerie Baloo" (named after the Scottish lullaby Baloo Baleerie) for her 2006 album, Scribbled in Chalk. In 2009 Raymond Raszkowski Ross based a play on her life, A Promised Land, and New Zealand journalist Lynley Smith wrote a fictionalised diary, From Matron to Martyr (2012), based on Haining's life. In 2016 Haining was named in the video accompanying "Girl (Daughter of Scotland)", a Scottish women's anthem by Sharon Martin. BBC Scotland poet-in-residence Stuart A. Paterson wrote a tribute to Haining for National Holocaust Memorial Day 2018, "In Days of Darkness".

Seventy-five years after her death the Church of Scotland's Life and Work magazine reprinted its 1946 article about her dedication and death: 'A Gallant Lady' who 'Faced the Gestapo'.

On 10 June 2021, the Scottish Episcopal Church at its General Synod voted to include Haining in its calendar of saints and heroes. She will be remembered on 17 July. A brass stolperstein has been placed outside St Stephen's Church in Stockbridge, Edinburgh, in Haining's memory unveiled in Edinburgh in November 2025 in a ceremony attended by members of her family. The church had held a service for her in 1932 before she left for her work as a matron in Budapest.