Jane Haining
Jane Mathison Haining was a Scottish missionary for the Church of Scotland in Budapest, Hungary, who was recognised in 1997 by Yad Vashem in Israel as Righteous Among the Nations for having risked her life to help Jews during the Holocaust.
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. 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.
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.
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.
Little is known about Haining's work in Budapest or death in Auschwitz. In 1949 a Scottish minister, the Reverend David McDougall, editor of the Jewish Mission Quarterly, published a 21-page booklet about her, Jane Haining of Budapest. 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.
Early life
Born at Lochenhead Farm in Dunscore, Dumfriesshire, Scotland, Haining was the fifth child of Jane Mathison and her husband, Thomas John Haining, a farmer, who had married in 1890. Mathison, herself from a farming family, died in 1902 while giving birth to the couple's sixth child, when Haining was about five. Haining's father remarried in January 1922 and died that June. Toward the end of the year, his second wife, Robertina Maxwell, gave birth to a daughter, Agnes.Haining grew up as a member of the evangelical Craig Church in Dunscore, part of the United Free Church of Scotland. Educated at Dunscore village school, she won a scholarship to Dumfries Academy in 1909, as her older sisters Alison and Margaret had done, where she lived as a boarder in the Moat Hostel for Girls. She graduated as the school dux, one of 41 school prizes she was awarded, and left with Highers in English, French, German, Latin and Mathematics.
Career
Secretarial work, retraining
After graduating, Haining trained at the Athenaeum Commercial College in Glasgow, and from 1917 until 1927 worked in Paisley for J. and P Coats Ltd, a thread manufacturer, first as a clerk, then as secretary to the private secretary. During this period, she lived at 90 Forth Street, Pollokshields, Glasgow, and attended the nearby Queen's Park West United Free Church, where she taught Sunday School. According to Nan Potter, who attended the classes, Haining would buy the children cream buns for tuppence ha'penny. It was around this time that she became interested in becoming a missionary. In 1927 she attended a meeting in Glasgow of the Jewish Mission Committee and heard Rev. Dr. George Mackenzie, chair of the committee, discuss his missionary work. She reportedly told a friend "I have found my lifework!"Her manager at work was ill at the time, so Haining stayed with Coats for another five months, then another year while he trained her replacement. There followed a one-year diploma course at the Glasgow College of Domestic Science, which gave her a qualification in domestic science and housekeeping. She took a temporary post in Glasgow, then in Manchester as a matron. In or around 1932 she responded to an advertisement in the Church of Scotland magazine Life and Work, looking for a matron for the girls' hostel attached to its Jewish mission school in Budapest. The majority of the United Free Church of Scotland had united with the Church of Scotland in 1929.
Scottish mission
The Jewish mission ran a school for both Jewish and Christian girls in its mission building at 51 Vörösmarty Street. The Church of Scotland had established the mission, also known as St Columba's Church, in 1841 to evangelize Hungarian Jews. The founding ministers, Alexander Black and Alexander Keith, along with Andrew Bonar and Robert Murray M'Cheyne, had been making their way to Jerusalem to spread Christianity, when Black is reported to have injured himself falling from his camel, as a result of which he and Keith decided to return to Scotland. They did so via Budapest, where their stay became protracted when Keith fell ill. The Archduchess Dorothea of Austria befriended them there, and the men were persuaded to establish a Scottish mission in that city.Work for the mission
The Jewish mission committee sent Haining for further training at St Colm's Women's Missionary College in Edinburgh. Her dedication service took place at St Stephen's Church, Edinburgh, on 19 June 1932, during a service presided over by the chair of the Jewish mission committee, Dr. Stewart Thompson. Haining left for Budapest the next day, seven months before Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933.The girls' home was on the third floor of the Vörösmarty Street mission building, and consisted of two bedrooms with about 16 girls in each room, as of 1932. Most of the students were Jews. McDougall wrote in 1949: "Not all the girls were Jewesses however, for it was considered wise to have a proportion of Christian girls among them."
Haining wrote that the school had 400 pupils ranging from six to 16; 30–40 of them were boarders, either live-in or day boarders. These were the girls for whom Haining was responsible. Although Hungarian law did not allow religious conversion before the age of 18, she wrote, the school aimed to prepare its Jewish students for conversion to Christianity. The daily Bible lesson for all pupils included study of the New Testament. Haining made efforts to have part of the building converted to club rooms, so that the evangelical work could continue for girls who had left the school, as most did when they were 14 or 15.
World War II
When World War II broke out on 3 September 1939, Haining was on holiday in Cornwall with Margit Prém, the Hungarian head of the mission's elementary school. The women returned immediately to Budapest. They had hoped to take Haining's sister Agnes back with them for a visit, but the war changed their plans. According to McDougall, Haining wrote to someone: "The journey back was a nightmare—five changes, no porters, no hot food, crowded trains like Bank Holiday plus luggage, no sanitary conveniences fit to mention, two nights spent on the platform beside, or on, our luggage." In 1940 the Church of Scotland missions committee in Edinburgh advised her to return to Scotland, but according to McDougall she felt safe in Hungary and decided to stay. He mentioned her briefly in his book In Search of Israel : "Miss Haining, the matron of the girls' home, stayed on after the others, and she is there still. By roundabout ways we hear from her sometimes." She wrote to someone shortly after the outbreak of war:From then on, particularly from 1941, Jewish refugees from all over German-occupied Europe began arriving in Hungary to escape the Holocaust. According to McDougall, Haining wrote to someone in or around 1938: "What a ghastly feeling it must be to know that no one wants you and to feel that your neighbours literally grudge you your daily bread." According to one colleague, she would rise at 5 am on market days to find food for the home and would carry the heavy bags back herself. She is reported to have cut up her leather suitcase to repair the girls' shoes. A pupil at the school told a filmmaker decades later: "We understood even as third-graders, that we are protected here, we are not harmed, we are protected, and we are equals. We could see, we could understand this, because they behaved accordingly."
Rev. George Knight, the mission's superintendent, wrote in 1944, after Haining's death: "During those awful years of the 'war of nerves,' when refugees were pouring out of Germany into the comparative safety of Hungary, the Mission staff spent a hectic time attempting to aid those émigrés to continue their flight to Great Britain and the Western Hemisphere. We established a training school for prospective domestic servants and Miss Haining ... gave courses of lectures to Jewish refugees on British conditions."
German invasion of Hungary
On 19 March 1944, the German Wehrmacht invaded Hungary, and the SS immediately began arranging for the country's Jews to be deported to Auschwitz. SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann and his Sondereinsatzkommando Ungarn arrived in Budapest to take charge of the deportations. On 31 March a range of anti-Jewish restrictions were introduced, in force as of 5 April: Jews were forbidden from owning cars and radios, using telephones, moving home, wearing school uniform, or using public baths, swimming pools, public restaurants, cafes, bars or catering services. They had to declare any property except for a small amount of household items. Jewish lawyers, civil servants, and journalists were sacked, non-Jews were not allowed to work in Jewish households, books by Jews could not be published, and those already in existence could not be borrowed from libraries.Jews over the age of six were required to wear a 10 x 10 cm yellow badge in the shape of the Star of David on the left chest of their outer clothing. Following the decree, Jews would be arrested for petty issues, such as wearing a star of the wrong size. In mid-April 1944 the SS began herding them into holding areas, including ghettos and brick factories, where they were held for weeks with little to eat.
Arrest
Charges
The Church of Scotland Jewish mission committee in Edinburgh wrote to the British Foreign Office around the time of the invasion of Hungary that it was "under a very deep debt of gratitude to Miss Jane Haining ... By her personal influence and faithfulness she has inspired such loyalty that the Budapest Mission has maintained its former high standards. Recent events have seriously altered the situation and the thoughts of the Church will be with and her colleagues in the new difficulties that have arisen."In late April or early May 1944, two officers from the Gestapo arrived at the mission home to arrest Haining. They searched her office and bedroom, and gave her 15 minutes to pack. According to one colleague's diary entry on 30 April 1944, Haining was "now in the cellars of Police HQ. I asked why and was told that a charwoman denounced her of having a secret radio receiver". She was at first held in a house used by the Gestapo in the Buda Hills, before being moved to Fő utca prison. Her friends took her weekly parcels of food and clean underwear. According to a fellow prisoner, Miss Francis W. Lee, as told by David McDougall in 1949, Haining was questioned twice and had the following charges put to her:
According to McDougall, Haining had been given permission by the Hungarian government to visit British prisoners of war, and she had indeed sent them parcels. After admitting the charges, except for the allegation of political activity, Haining was moved to the Kistarcsa transit camp. Her friends arrived at the Fő utca prison with food and clean underwear, but she had gone. Francis Lee wrote in July 1945 to Dr. Laszlo Nagy of the Hungarian Reformed Church:
Bishop László Ravasz told the Scottish Mission in 1946 that he had tried to obtain support for Haining from Admiral Miklós Horthy, the Regent of Hungary, who, Ravasz said, "learned of the case with deep regret and assured me of his sympathy for the Church of Scotland and all her workers". Ravasz also spoke to or met with the State Secretary Miklos Mester and the Hungarian prime minister, who, at the time of Haining's arrest, was Döme Sztójay. Ravasz understood that the prime minister had instructed an under-secretary to seek Haining's release, but Ravasz received no further reply to his inquiries.