Thought for the Week

A few days ago, I received an invitation to attend the launch of a biography of Jane Haining by Mary Miller. Jane is relatively unknown but she led an interesting and ultimately tragic life.

She was born to a farming family in rural Dumfriesshire at the end of the 19th century. She went to school in Dumfries and came to Glasgow in her late teens to train at Commercial College. She was a committed Christian and taught Sunday School in her local church. In 1932, she went to Budapest in Hungary to be matron of a boarding house for Christian and Jewish girls run by the Scottish Mission to the Jews. She became devoted to the 32 girls for whom she cared and became like a second mother to them. She was in Scotland when World War 2 broke out but insisted on returning to Budapest. In 1940, she was ordered back to Scotland, but she refused to leave her girls. In 1944, Germany invaded Hungary which had up to that time been neutral. Harsh anti-Jewish laws were enacted, and Jewish people were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Jane refused to desert her post and continued to care for her girls. She was arrested because “she worked amongst the Jews”. She was sent to Auschwitz, along with many Jewish girls from the school. She survived the horrendous journey but died of overwork and malnutrition three months later.

Her sacrifice has not been forgotten. There are memorials in the Scot’s Kirk in Budapest and in her home church in Queen’s Park. She is honoured in Israel’s Holocaust memorial as Righteous among the Nations and she is named a British Hero of the Holocaust.

We read in Paul’s letter to the Philippians: “Jesus made himself nothing, taking the very nature of servant… he humbled himself and was obedient to death—even death on a Cross”

On several occasions, Jane could have walked away, and no one would have blamed her. But she chose to follow the example of Jesus and stayed to care for the weak and oppressed.

She obeyed his call to serve even at the cost of her own life.