Jane Haining would not have said so herself, but she lived a remarkable life of service and commitment to what God called her to do. Jane was born in 1897. Her father, Thomas, farmed just outside the village of Dunscore, near Dumfries, and her mother was also Jane.
In due time she went to Budapest as a missionary with the Church of Scotland, serving in the Scottish Mission and at the Scottish Mission School from 1932 until her death at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in 1944. Her story serves as a reminder that alongside the well-known ‘martyrs’ of the twentieth century, there are those who are not so well known, but equally dedicated. It is sympathetically and movingly retold in Mary Miller’s Jane Haining: A Life of Love and Courage.
As Miller comments: “She epitomised the ordinary person who becomes extraordinary through faith, hope and love, although she chose to be reticent all her life about her personal feelings and views.”
Jane lived in a different era, and there is no doubt that her aim was conversion of the Jewish girls for whom she cared in the Scottish Mission School. That approach would not be adopted today. However, it is equally true that her prime aim was to care for those in her charge and, in those later days, to protect them from the Nazi persecution of the Jews. For that she paid the ultimate price.
And so, again quoting Mary Miller: “She challenges us to remember that the most ordinary people still have a choice when they are confronted with intolerable evil: even if only in our hearts, we can refuse to consent to the division of humanity into ‘them’ and ‘us’ and the dehumanising of the ‘other’. We can refuse to be corrupted. It is for this that Jane Haining stands as an inspiration for ‘ordinary’ people in all times and places.”
