Jane Haining

Jane Haining was born in 1897 on a farm near Dunscore in Dumfriesshire. Her mother died when she was five, and she grew up capable and reserved, doing well at Dumfries Academy and then working for ten years as a secretary at the Coats thread company in Paisley. She was in her thirties when she saw a notice for a post as matron of the girls' home at the Church of Scotland's mission school in Budapest, and applied.

She arrived in 1932 to a school of several hundred girls, most of them Jewish, some boarders whose families were far away or had fallen apart. She learned Hungarian, mended their clothes and became, for the youngest, the closest thing to a mother. As the anti-Jewish laws tightened in Hungary she saw the girls' fear at first hand.

When war came the church told its staff to return home. She refused, in a letter that has become her memorial, saying the children needed her more in dark days than in sunny ones. She stayed on through the years of uneasy Hungarian neutrality, and when the Germans occupied the country in March 1944 she carried on as before.

In April she was arrested by the Gestapo on charges that included weeping while sewing yellow stars onto the girls' clothes and listening to the BBC. She was sent to Auschwitz, where she died in July 1944, aged forty-seven. Yad Vashem recognised her as Righteous Among the Nations in 1997.