9-19-16

Jane Haining was a missionary with the Church of Scotland when she gave her life protecting Jewish schoolgirls. Now, a collection of documents and photographs has been discovered which sheds new light on the woman known as “Scotland’s Schindler”, who died in 1944 at Auschwitz. The items recovered include photographs of more than seventy of the Jewish girls she saved during World War Two, as well as a handwritten will.

“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. In Budapest, I’ve come across the street named after her on the Pest side of the river Danube and then seen her name engraved on a memorial beside the tree of remembrance in the Synagogue. You realise the impact this ordinary but courageous young woman has made on the city,” the minister at Dornoch Cathedral in the Highlands, Reverend Susan Brown, told the Huffington Post.

Haining was born in 1897 and moved to Budapest to take a position as matron of the Jewish Mission School, where 315 pupils, 48 of them boarders and a number of them orphans, were educated. As the Nazis moved across Europe, her situation became increasingly dangerous, resulting in her superiors ordering her to return to Scotland on three separate occasions. Haining, however, refused to leave “her” girls behind.