Jane Haining, Martyr of the Holocaust

Jane Haining was a missionary for the United Free Church of Scotland and stationed in Budapest. She is the only Scot to be noted for giving her life in the rescue of Jewish prisoners during the holocaust. Haining was the head mistress at a boarding school for girls in Budapest, the Scottish Mission School. The school was founded in 1841 and was funded by donations from Christian Jews in Hungary. Haining was in the U.K during the break out of the Second World War, on vacation in Cornwall, when she decided to return to Budapest. In 1940, the church had ordered her to return to the U.K but she refused and instead stayed with her girls at the boarding school. She also refused to leave the school after the German occupation of Hungary in 1944 and was swiftly arrested by the Gestapo for "working among the Jews" and "listening to the BBC." She was eventually sent to Auschwitz where she "died in the infirmary." Well after her death, personal effects were found in an attic at the Church of Scotland's headquarters in Edinburgh. Among them were more than seventy pictures of Jewish girls she ricked her life trying to save and paperwork from the church attempting to secure her release. A document from a bishop in the Reformed Church of Hungary chronicled how the church made attempts to bargain with Hungarian authorities to no avail. In 2010 Haining was named a British Hero of the Holocaust by the British Government.

For me, the obvious reading for Jane Haining would be Jesus and the children in Matthew 19,

"Then little children were being brought to him in order that he might lay his hands on them and pray. The disciples spoke sternly to those who brought them; but Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.’ And he laid his hands on them and went on his way." (Matt. 19:13-15)

I would then accompany this with a very simple piano version of the childhood classic "Jesus Loves Me"

Photo: Jane Haining memorial in her hometown of Dumfriesshire, Scotland