A brass plaque has been laid in honour of a Church of Scotland school matron who died in Auschwitz through the Second World War.
Jane Haining worked on the Scottish Mission School in Budapest, Hungary, starting her role there in 1932. The school had around 400 students, including boarders aged 6 to 16 years old. Some of the scholars were Jews.
Haining was arrested in April 1944 after the cook’s son-in-law informed the Germans that she was hiding Jews.
According to former student, Agnes Rostas, as she was being taken away Haining told the crying students, “Don’t worry, I’ll be back by lunch.”
In fact, Haining was imprisoned before being transported to Auschwitz with Hungarian Jews the next month.
She was pressed into slave labour and a number of months later was dead on the age of 47. Her official death certificate stated that she died of cachexia following intestinal catarrh, even though it is probably going she was killed within the gas chambers.
She is the one Scot to be declared “Righteous Among the Nations” by the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem. The term refers to non-Jews who, at great personal risk, attempted to assist or protect Jews through the Holocaust, with Oskar Schindler being perhaps probably the most famous example.
The recent memorial to Haining was placed outside the previous St Stephen’s Church constructing in Stockbridge, Edinburgh, and is a component of a Europe-wide project to honour those that suffered under National Socialism.
The memorial is a ‘Stolperstein’ or ‘stumbling block’ created by the German artist Gunter Demnig. 116,000 such memorials have been laid across 31 European countries, with Haining’s the primary in Scotland.
Rt Rev Rosie Frew, Moderator of the Church of Scotland General Assembly, spoke at the disclosing of the memorial.
“We are delighted that a ‘Stolperstein’ has been laid in memory of Jane Haining, who was the matron of the Scottish Mission School in Budapest within the Thirties and Nineteen Forties.”
Haining, she said, had also helped Jewish women learn domestic service management skills to ensure that them to maneuver more easily to the protection of Britain.
“An inspirational woman of deep faith, she was fully aware of the extraordinary risks she was taking but repeatedly refused Church of Scotland pleas to depart the Hungarian capital and return home to Scotland because the war engulfed Europe,” Rev Frew continued.
“Jane was determined to proceed doing her duty and stick with her post and famously said ‘If these children need me in days of sunshine, how far more do they need me in days of darkness?’.
“She was concurrently an odd and extraordinary woman and her story is one among heroism and private sacrifice and reminds us that after we feel powerless, there may be all the time something that we will do.
“It is a nice example of service over self-interest and we hope that this honour, the primary of its kind in Scotland, will help keep her memory alive for generations to come back.”
Also present on the ceremony were representatives of the Haining family and of Scotland’s Jewish community.
Haining has also been honoured with a Heroine of the Holocaust medal by the British government, a stained-glass window on the church she attended, Queen’s Park Govanhill Church, Glasgow, and a street named after her – Haining Park in Midlothian.
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