Jane Haining.

You probably don’t recognize that name but she is one of my heroes. Jane is the only Scottish woman to have died in a Nazi death camp. She wasn’t a Jew, but she refused to walk away from the children she loved.

In 1932, God called Jane to work at a Church of Scotland mission to the Jews in Budapest, Hungry. Famous for her strong Scottish accent, she was popular with the 400 children who attended the school. Many were orphans, from broken or poverty-stricken homes, while others were sent simply because the Scottish teachers provided an excellent education.

This undated photo shows the girls of the Scottish Mission school.

Jane was in Scotland on leave when World War 2 broke out, but immediately began the difficult and dangerous trip back to Budapest to help the Jewish children. When the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944, the Scottish missionaries were ordered to come home — but Jane refused to leave.

“If these children need me in the days of sunshine,” she said, “how much more do they need me in the days of darkness?”

She protected 315 students at the school for four long years before finally being betrayed and arrested by the Gestapo. Jane was thrown in jail on charges of British espionage and helping Jews. One of the charges against her was … weeping. Jane wept, as she had to sew the yellow stars of David onto the dresses of her children.

Strange Days When Mercy is a Crime

In the summer of 1944, this almost unknown Scottish woman stood out among the tide of human misery shuffling from the railway cattle trucks into the barracks at Auschwitz. Jane died in a gas chamber on August 16th, 1944. She was just forty-seven years old.

In 1997, the Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Memorial in Jerusalem awarded Jane a medal and her name was engraved on the honor wall in the Garden of the Righteous. It reads, “Whoever saves one life is as though he had saved the entire world.”

We live in strange days. Who knows what might be regarded as a crime in years to come. Jane’s legacy to me and I hope to you is simple; she remained who she was no matter what shifted around her. She didn’t yell and scream. She didn’t run and hide. She stayed where God had called her and shared his love until her last breath. One of the children in her care later remembered her this way; “I still feel the tears in my eyes and hear in my ears the siren of the Gestapo motor car. I see the smile on her face while she bade me farewell.”

Jane wasn’t molded by her circumstances. She was yielded clay in the Potter’s hands. She wasn’t afraid of what men can do for a moment because she knew what Christ has done eternally. May we all live with such quiet confidence in the days to come.

“I have told you all this so that you may have peace in me. Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world.”
— John 16:33 (NLT)