Jane Haining Memorial

This memorial is in the churchyard of the parish church in Dunscore, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland, Jane's home village. At the start of WW2 Jane Haining was working as a missionary for the Church of Scotland in Budapest. She died in Auschwitz in 1944 and has been recognised by Yad Vashem as "Righteous Among the Nations," having risked her life to help Jews in the Holocaust. The churchyard memorial was funded by public subscription and was installed in 2005.

Jane worked in Budapest from 1932 as matron of a boarding house for girls (both Jewish and Christian) in a school run by the Scottish Mission to the Jews. Offered the chance to return to Scotland in 1940, she declined and continued her work, which she saw as including protection of the Jewish girls in the school from anti-Semitic activities predominant in Hungary at the time, a foretaste of worse to come. Amongst the "crimes" for which she was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 (after the German occupation of Hungary) was that she had "wept when putting yellow stars on the girls" in her care. She apparently died of starvation in Auschwitz on 17th July 1944, but details remain unclear.

Amongst the many other memorials to her are stained glass windows in Govanhill Parish Church (Glasgow), where she regularly worshipped before leaving for Hungary. In Edinburgh's Calton Hill park is a cairn (the Scottish Parliament Vigil Cairn) which includes a stone from Auschwitz to which is attached a plaque in her memory. She has her name inscribed on the wall of honour in the Garden of the Righteous in Jerusalem. In Budapest there are several memorial plaques and in 2010 a quay on the embankment on the Danube was named after her.

Her name is also listed amongst the notable former pupils of Dumfries Academy outside the school.