— JANE HAINING —
The Sunshine Spinster
‘How amiable are thy tabernacles, O Lord of Hosts’ is a sentence found in Psalm 84. ‘Tabernacle’ isn’t a word that pops up regularly in conversation. The original tabernacles were ‘dwelling places of God’ – places that the ancient Israelites specially set aside for their encounters with the power of the Divine. Yet, for all the lofty aims of the tabernacle, they were often more humble than you might imagine. Consisting of several layers of woven curtains draped round a series of poles, they were often little more than elaborate tents, designed to tempt the ethereal presence of the eternal Lord of Hosts to indulge in a spot of glamping. But so it was that the Hebrew people sought to encounter the ways of God – in an unlikely, makeshift structure on the rolling, sheep-scattered hillsides of Judea.
On a rolling, sheep-scattered hillside in Dumfriesshire, ‘How amiable are thy tabernacles, O Lord of Hosts’ are the words that a group of pious Scots Protestants chose to carve into the small chapel which they too had built in the hope of encountering the Divine. It was built in 1649, at the seemingly apocalyptic apogee of the English Civil Wars, when the presence of Divine power seemed both terrifyingly close and heartbreakingly distant. This little rock and brick tabernacle is perched on the hillside overlooking the small village of Dunscore. Nearly two hundred and fifty years after the chapel’s construction, in a farmhouse just outside Dunscore, a baby was born to Thomas and Jane Haining, a couple who eked out a living farming the rolling, sheep-scattered hills around the tabernacle. The baby was given the same name as her mother: Jane.
She would grow up to join a select group of British subjects who chanced everything to save the lives of Jewish people in continental Europe during the Second World War, risking the double condemnation of being both enemy aliens and being complicit in helping the most despised group in Nazi Germany. It is a small and eclectic selection from the palette of English eccentricity – from the pair of opera-loving sisters who would use their fur coats to smuggle papers and money to the somewhat listless Anglican Vicar who ended up issuing certificates to aid the escape of hundreds of Viennese Jews. Haining, however, stands out among this motley crew for a number of reasons, perhaps the most striking and moving of which being that she ended her days a long way from the verdant valleys of Dumfries in the hell that was Auschwitz–Birkenau.
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When Jane was just five years old, her mother died, leaving Thomas Haining to care for seven children. In the following years, Jane emerged from among the sizeable Haining brood as the child most likely to help her father with the rearing of her younger, and, at times, her elder, siblings. Being thrust into a world of proxy parenting and domestic work at such an early age did not, however, discourage Jane from entertaining dreams of a future beyond Dunscore. The family were deeply pious and, while other children whiled away the long hours of sermons in the little tabernacle kicking the backs of pews or planning adventures, Jane listened intently. She had a voracious appetite for books, with the little village school routinely having to source new volumes as Jane made short work of the entire contents of its little library.
After some cajoling by both the minister and the schoolmistress, both of whom had recognised Jane’s talents, Thomas Haining was persuaded to allow his daughter to apply for a scholarship to the prestigious academy in the county town of Dumfries. The twelve-year-old Jane won it with ease and so, in 1909, set off with her satchelful of pored-over books on what must have felt like an astonishing adventure. This period fostered in Jane a lifelong love of education – especially, and unusually in the early years of the twentieth century, the education of women.
In Dumfries, she again impressed her teachers with her instinctive inquisitiveness, earning her the school’s top prize. She had a natural ability and love for languages, her somewhat bookish demeanour transformed as she babbled away in proficient French and German. She soon earned a place at the College of the Glasgow Athenaeum, where she acquired the skills necessary to take a role as a commercial secretary (one of the new jobs opened to women after the profound sociological shift of the First World War). So, in the early 1920s, she joined the firm of J. & P. Coates Ltd in Paisley.
Yet work was not the centre-point around which Jane’s life revolved. That was, and always would be, her faith. She worshipped in a soaring neo-Gothic church on the edge of Queen’s Park in the south Glasgow neighbourhood of Govanhill. Ever curious, she was an avid attendee, not only of Sunday worship, but also the rigorous programme of ‘improving’ events that was often such an integral part of British Protestant denominations. For hundreds of thousands of Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians, ‘chapel’ was so much more than a place for religious services – it was where wives met their husbands, families deposited their savings, and where many in the increasingly aspirant working classes sought an education. She attended as many talks and lectures as she possibly could, one of which, in the early 1930s, was given by the head of the Church of Scotland’s mission in Budapest.
Jane was utterly transfixed. The thought of combining travel, work and faith in the service of others must have been especially appealing amid the belching chimneys of industrial Glasgow. Jane didn’t have to wait long to follow her new dream. In 1932, an advertisement in a Presbyterian periodical caught her eye. It was for a post as a matron in a home run by the Scottish Church for destitute Jewish girls in Budapest. To Jane it must have seemed almost divinely ordained: all those years as de facto mother in Dunscore, all those hours spent with her nose deep in continental grammars and vocabulary books; they all pointed towards this. Needless to say, she got the job.
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Budapest in 1932 was a great bustling conurbation at the crossroads of Europe. Its plum position on the Danube was at the geographical heart of Mitteleuropa, the half-imagined Habsburg hinterland between the excessive, fussy refinement of Western Europe and the brute force of the Kievan Rus; between the clamour of Prussia and Poland to the north and the lazy, almost oriental, languor of the Balkans to the south. Its political situation, too, seemed to be stuck halfway between the old Europe of Kaisers and Tsars and the ideological dictatorships that now hemmed it in on every side. It was a monarchy without a King, ruled by the self-appointed regent Admiral Horthy, whom we met earlier, while its monarch lived in enforced exile. Finally, it was at the crossroads of the new ethnolinguistic nation states and the multi-ethnic empires of old. Budapest, in particular, was a conflation of every tongue and confession imaginable; home to Hungarians, Slovaks, Romanians, Germans, Roman Catholics, Calvinists and Orthodox. It was also home to nearly a quarter of a million Jews.
Indeed, the Jewish population was so large that the city was known in German as Jüda-Pest; over 60 per cent of the city’s doctors and lawyers were Jewish. There were also substantial portions of the Jewish population eking out a living however they could, as tinkers, tailors, beggars or thieves. Judaism in Budapest had as many shades of synagogue as you could shake a stick at, but one thing that the diverse community had in common was an increasing uneasiness at the stories coming out of Germany. Horthy, in response to his pathological (but not unfounded) fear of the Soviet Union, cosied up to Hitler as a natural ally against Stalin, only increasing discontent among the Jews of Budapest.
It was in this febrile environment that Jane Haining arrived to take up her role as matron. Which seems a not unreasonable juncture at which to explain quite what the Church of Scotland was doing running a school on the Danube. During 1841, a group of Scottish missionaries had set out for Palestine in order to proselytise in Jerusalem. Unfortunately, they never got as far as the great City of Zion as one of their number injured himself falling off a camel. A certain Scots scepticism descended on the venture and so the party returned home, by way of the Austro–Hungarian Empire. Stopping off in Budapest, they were astonished to find the city teeming with broad Scottish accents as the engineers shipped in from Lothian and Leith set about building bridges, tunnels and railways for the Austro–Hungarians. Convinced that this was providential, the group set up a mission to the workers, which eventually evolved into a church and school for poor girls, in the hope that the sway of the manse might keep them off the boulevards of Budapest. The school became incredibly well regarded, especially by the Jewish community, as it was less prescriptive about whom it would educate than the Empire itself.
And so to this strange corner of Dundee on the Danube came Jane Haining, determined to be as loving and motherly as she could to girls who were often rejected by what family they had on account of their sex and, increasingly, by society at large on account of their race. She was a natural. Jane genuinely loved the girls in her charge, taking care of their every need – from ensuring that they ate a hearty Scots-style breakfast of porridge oats each morning to arranging trips to the lakes of the Hungarian highlands, where she would boat, swim and play with her pupils as if she herself were eleven again. Of course, she kept her girls in line, but she was undoubtedly firm but fair – a Miss Jean Brodie figure transposed to an increasingly fraught Mitteleuropa.
Jane Haining, who had, even as a young woman in industrial Glasgow, made it a strict rule of life not to talk politics, was blissfully unaware of, one might even say stubbornly unengaged with, the escalating European crisis. She was in fact back in the United Kingdom, on holiday in the West Country, when Britain declared war on Germany in 1939. Although Horthy’s prevarication and backstage dealing meant that Hungary remained technically neutral, the elders of the Church of Scotland back in Edinburgh showed the same caution as their camel-riding forebears and ordered that the entire staff of the Budapest mission return (or in Haining’s case remain) home. Haining ignored the warnings of both Church and state and immediately booked her return to Budapest, considering a looming world war only a minor inconvenience, and certainly not one that should prevent her from fulfilling her duty to her girls.
Over the following two years, Church officials repeatedly begged Haining to return, only for her to refuse every time. Ministers in Scotland became exasperated at her refusal to listen to reason, born out of a stubborn belief in the goodness of the people she was there to serve. In one of her many polite but firm replies to the Synod in Scotland, she wrote, ‘These people are so true hearted and honourable that they will not harm a hair on my head.’ In 1941, Horthy’s delicate balancing act finally collapsed and Hungary declared war on the USSR, with Britain declaring war on the Hungarians in a gesture of support not long after. Jane Haining was now an enemy alien. Her Scottish colleagues sent one final plea to call the matron home. Haining replied with a typically respectful but curt letter, containing the words that were to become her epitaph: ‘If these girls need me in times of sunshine,’ she wrote, ‘how much more do they need me in these times of darkness.’
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Behind the somewhat austere façade of the schoolhouse in Budapest, the advent of war seemingly changed little. By the cold January and February of 1942, the privation brought by wartime austerity had begun to bite, but that was nothing more than a jolly challenge for the resourceful matron. When, for instance, the soles of a number of girls’ shoes began to wear out amidst the grey snow covering the boulevards, Haining cut up her leather suitcases for insoles to keep the girls’ feet dry and warm. Food became harder to come by, but Haining managed the supplies in such a way as to make sure that the girls remained well fed. She even put together aid packages for British soldiers captured and interned near the Austrian border. She continued to tune in to the BBC most evenings; love Hungary though she did, some of the affectations of the strange group of islands in the North Atlantic inevitably remained.
For this blessed incubation from the mutual annihilation that was engulfing Europe, the pupils really had two people to thank. One was Jane Haining, who made sure to instil in them trust in and love for God and each with her oft-repeated maxim that not a hair on their heads would be harmed. The other, less likely, figure who shielded the girls of Budapest, was Admiral Miklós Horthy. The Hungarian regent’s entry into the war had not especially affected his policy of prevarication. Hungarian troops were sent to the Eastern Front, including Horthy’s own son, who died after a matter of days on the front line when his aircraft stalled just after take-off. But on a number of matters he resisted efforts by Berlin to influence domestic policy – in particular with regard to Hungary’s Jews. He willingly allowed the deportation and mass execution of foreign Jews resident in Hungary (many of whom had fled there from the surrounding nations in the hope of sanctuary), as well as punitive measures limiting the number of Jews who could hold professional roles. When confronted with demands to send the entire population for Nazi ‘resettlement’, however, the Admiral sought to buy time by promising to do so incrementally. As a result of Horthy’s non-committal attitude and the sacrifice of their foreign co-religionists, the Jews of Budapest – including the girls of the Church of Scotland school – were able to continue in the belief that they would be spared.
In early 1944, however, Horthy’s (and by extension Haining’s) luck ran out. Enraged by the Admiral’s lacklustre attitude, Hitler ordered the invasion and occupation of Hungary. Horthy remained a pathetic puppet, but power was now increasingly in the hands of the Hungarian Arrow Cross movement. Within two weeks of German invasion, laws against foreign aliens were tightened and the entire Jewish population of Hungary – including Jane’s girls – was put ‘at the disposal of the Reich’. One day, some pupils came across their matron weeping as she darned their clothes, a task she normally took great delight in. On closer inspection they realised she wasn’t darning at all but sewing child-sized yellow stars onto each of the girls’ uniforms.
Haining’s double identity as a known defender of Jews and as an enemy alien put her at obvious risk once the Nazis had taken full control of Hungary. In the end, it was the two most defining aspects of her ministry that led to her downfall: her implicit trust of the Hungarian people and her devotion to her girls. Not long after the German invasion, as food became even scarcer, Haining caught the son-in-law of the school’s Hungarian cook stealing rations intended for the girls. Haining scolded him for putting his own needs above those of the pupils and assumed that would be the end of it. Within a couple of days, she had been denounced and the Gestapo were at the door. The horrors of war had finally come to the little Scottish school in Budapest.
The Gestapo provided a long list of Haining’s supposed crimes, as detailed by their Hungarian informer: listening to the BBC, aiding enemy soldiers and, above all, working among Jews. During two hours of questioning, Haining, in perfect German, admitted to all of the charges except one. When accused of political activity, she vigorously denied it. Her intentions had never been political. She had only sought to do what she felt God had called her to do: to love the girls in her care. That very same morning, 25th April 1944, Jane Haining was arrested and taken away to prison.
But Jane had not left her girls unprepared. She, in cooperation with other staff, had helped a number of the students to escape Budapest, reaching contacts in the countryside and further afield. While officials were preoccupied with the arrest of their matron, there was a vital window for the staff and girls to smuggle those they could to safety. As the soldiers led her away, she turned back towards the crowd of scared girls who had gathered on the staircase and, with a smile, told them not to worry – ‘I’ll be back by lunch,’ she said. It was the last time that the girls would see her, but some of them are still alive today.
Barely a month after her arrest, Jane Haining was shunted into a cattle truck at Budapest station and transported to Auschwitz–Birkenau. Ever since her arrest, there had been frantic attempts to free her by Bishop László Ravasz, the nation’s pre-eminent Calvinist Church leader, but to no avail. Ravasz was put under house arrest for his trouble; the Nazis were determined to make an example of the farmer’s daughter from Dumfries. Of course, she was not bundled onto the train to Poland alone. Such was the size of the Jewish population in Hungary and such was the efficiency of the Nazi killing machine that it is estimated that in May and June 1944 some twelve thousand people a day were transported to death camps. Doctors and lawyers were thrown in with the tinkers and tailors, and in among them all was Jane Haining. Conditions on the trains were appalling and the treatment of those deported truly shocking. Families were split up, leaving many children terrified. Jane, aware of the calling she had left behind, did what she could, with a particular eye for girls separated from their mothers. A word of comfort here, a held hand there. Some sunshine amid the darkness.
On arrival at the train station at Auschwitz, all those designated fit for slave labour were tattooed with a number to render them identifiable as prisoners, even when the extreme privation in the camp rendered them barely recognisable as humans. Jane Haining’s number was 79467. On 15th July 1944, Haining somehow – perhaps due to her conspicuous non-Jewish status and her British rather than Hungarian citizenship, perhaps just due to her stubborn persistence – managed to get a final letter to her colleague and friend, Miss Prem, back in Budapest. The scrawled German contains no reference to her own state, only concerns about the welfare of the girls and lines of affection for Miss Prem. Her one reference to herself is to say that she is ‘on the way to Heaven’. Even as she suffered under the most egregious example of man’s inhumanity to man, she kept her humanity. When God might have seemed dead amid the horrors of life on earth, she kept her faith in a better life beyond.
On 17th July 1944, Jane Haining was recorded as having died of inflammation of the intestine. It is almost certain that, in fact, she was gassed to death with a group of women from Hungary in the chambers at Birkenau the day before. She died with those whom she had felt called to serve in life – the forgotten, then despised, Jewish women of Hungary.
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Tens of thousands of years since the Israelites sought the comfort of God’s presence in those tabernacles on the parched hillsides of Judea, a woman from the hill country of Scotland sought to make the presence of God known in the best way she knew how; by showing love to her fellow humans despite the most appalling of circumstances. On the slopes above Dunscore, just outside that other ramshackle rock tabernacle with the words of the psalm carved on its side, a small memorial bears the name and briefly tells the story of Jane Haining. Her name is now inscribed not only on the windswept hillside near Dumfries, but also on a hillside overlooking Jerusalem, not far from where those first tabernacles were constructed. She is listed as one of the ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ at the World Holocaust Memorial Centre of Yad Vashem.
‘How amiable are thy tabernacles, O Lord of Hosts.’ If a bedraggled tent on the Judean hillside was an unlikely place to see the power of God in action, how much more so is a converted cattle truck or an uninhabitable barrack hut on those bare Polish plains. Yet the life and witness of Jane Haining is testament to just that; so too was her death. Sometimes the most powerful stories aren’t those that end with triumph, or are replete with bombs and bombast. Sometimes resistance doesn’t take the form of an inspired speech or a great public deed. Sometimes the most powerful moments are found in the most unexpected and unlikely places. Sometimes resistance is saying you’ll be back by lunch. Sometimes it is holding a frightened little girl’s hand.