A Scottish “Holocaust heroine” and quiet champion of educating girls helped save many Jews in Hungary before dying herself in a Nazi concentration camp, according to a book out on Wednesday.
Jane Haining, who cared for hundreds of Jewish girls at the Scottish Mission School in Budapest during World War II, died at Auschwitz camp after the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944.
Author Mary Miller said Haining was “an ordinary person who became extraordinary” through her love and courage.
“She was an independent woman and kept an independent spirit throughout all the awful things that were later to happen,” Miller told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Born into a humble farming family in Dumfries in 1987, Haining studied business and became “an early career girl”.
In 1932, she moved to Hungary to work as a matron at the school, which educated Christian and Jewish children together to foster mutual respect.
“They were part of that whole movement to give girls a good education,” Miller said.
Pressure on the school grew rapidly as Jewish refugees poured into Budapest, fleeing persecution elsewhere in Europe.
As anti-semitism intensified, the Scottish Mission, which oversaw the school, organised courses in practical subjects to help Jews emigrate and get jobs abroad. Haining helped women secure work as domestic servants in Britain under the program.
Following the outbreak of war in 1939, Haining refused her employers’ orders to return to Britain.
“She said that if these girls needed me in good times, they need me much more in bad times,” Miller said.
By then, most of the school’s 400 pupils were Jewish, and many of the boarders Haining cared for were orphans.
Read the article by Emma Batha on Sight Magazine.