Jane Haining

Jane Haining
Born(1897-06-06)6 June 1897
Dunscore, Scotland
Died17 July 1944(1944-07-17) (aged 47)
Auschwitz II-Birkenau, German-occupied Poland
Cause of deathUnknown[1]
OccupationChristian missionary in Hungary
Years active1932–1944
EmployerChurch of Scotland
Parents
  • Jane Mathison (1866–1902)
  • Thomas John Haining (1867–1922)
Awards

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

Haining worked in Budapest from June 1932 as matron of a boarding house for Jewish and Christian girls in a school run by the Scottish Mission to the Jews.[3][c] In or around 1940, after the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the Church of Scotland advised Haining to return to Britain, but she decided to stay in Hungary.[5]

When Germany invaded Hungary in March 1944, the SS began arranging the deportation of the country's Jews to Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the German extermination camp in occupied Poland.[d]

Arrested by the Gestapo in April 1944 on a variety of charges, apparently after a dispute with the school's cook, Haining was herself deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in May. She died there two months later, probably as a result of starvation and the camp's catastrophic living conditions.[2]

Little is known about Haining's work in Budapest or death in Auschwitz. In 1949 a Scottish minister, the Reverend David McDougall (1889–1964), editor of the Jewish Mission Quarterly,[9] published a 21-page booklet about her, Jane Haining of Budapest.[10] According to Jennifer Robertson, writing in 2014 for PRISM: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators, almost all subsequent publications about Haining depend on McDougall's booklet.[11]

  1. ^ Robertson 2014, p. 33.
  2. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference YadVashem was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Lester 2013; Robertson 2014, p. 30.
  4. ^ Glaser 1998, p. 9.
  5. ^ McDougall 1949, p. 16.
  6. ^ Piper 1998, pp. 70–71.
  7. ^ "Ethnic origins and number of victims of Auschwitz". Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. Archived from the original on 2 February 2019.
  8. ^ Cite error: The named reference Braham1998p465 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  9. ^ McDougall & Alexander 1998, p. 40.
  10. ^ McDougall 1949.
  11. ^ Robertson 2014, p. 34.


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