The handwritten will of a Scottish woman who died in Auschwitz after refusing to abandon Jewish girls in her care at a missionary school in Budapest has been 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.



Detail from Haining’s will

Her will, which bequeaths “money left after meeting funeral 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 Edinburgh.



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. The material is to be handed over to the National Library of Scotland.



The 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?’” She “embodies so much of the internationalist spirit”, he added.

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 holiday 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 chivalrous 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.’”

Pupils at Haining’s missionary school.

When Nazi troops entered Budapest in March 1944, she again rejected entreaties to leave, instead 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 medal. Photograph: Ellen Howden/Glasgow Life/Glasgow Museums

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 unseen 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.”

