Jane Haining
A new heritage centre celebrating the life of Holocaust heroine Jane Haining will be opened in a Scottish church, the Church of Scotland has announced.
Haining’s extraordinary story – in which she gave her life at the age of 47 to help protect Jewish schoolgirls during World War II – will be told in the new centre which is expected to be opened in Dunscore Church near Dumfries later this year.
The centre, which will be housed in an extended and modified room within the church, will features photographs, letters, documents and other personal effects relating to the missionary, who, following her birth in 1897, attended the Craig Church in Dunscore with her family. The artefacts on show will include her hand-written last will and testament which was found in Church of Scotland offices in Edinburgh last year.
Rev Ian Alexander, secretary of the World Mission Council of the Church of Scotland, said Haining’s story was heart-breaking but truly inspirational.
“The heritage centre will include information on the life of Jane Haining, a woman who was simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary, and will highlight how her life in the church, the village and the community shaped her, and prepared her for her future work,” he said. “The life of faith weaves itself through the whole history of the village, and having a warm and welcoming Church will offer opportunity for people to be transformed today and also go out and change the world.”
Haining, who was matron of the Scottish Mission School in Budapest from 1932 until her death, was in Cornwall on holiday when the Second World War broke out in 1939. She immediately returned to her post in Budapest and several times after that refused orders to return home, famously writing that “[i]f these children need me in days of sunshine, how much more do they need me in days of darkness”.
She protected and sheltered the girls in her care for four years until she was betrayed by the school cook’s son-in-law whom she had caught stealing food. Arrested by the Gestapo, one of her former pupils, Agnes Rostas, revealed in September last year that her last words to sobbing children were “Don’t worry, I’ll be back by lunch”. She never did return but was held in a Budapest prison for several months before she was transferred to Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland. There she is believed to have perished in the gas chambers in 1944.
Haining was posthumously named as Righteous Among the Nations in Jerusalem’s sacred Yad Vashem in 1997 and awarded a Hero of the Holocaust medal by the UK Government in 2010. There is already a memorial cairn to her near Dunscore Church.
The heritage centre, which has been approved by the Church of Scotland Kirk’s Committee on Church Art and Architecture, will be partly funded by a £106,400 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund and Historic Environment Scotland.
