Jane Mathison Haining (6 June 1897 – 17 July 1944)[a] was a Scottish missionary for the Church of Scotland in Budapest, Hungary, who was recognized in 1997 by Yad Vashem in Israel as Righteous Among the Nations for having risked her life to help Jews during the Holocaust.

[b] Haining worked in Budapest from June 1932 as matron of a boarding house for Jewish and Christian girls in a school run by the Scottish Mission to the Jews.

[3][c] In or around 1940, after the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the Church of Scotland advised Haining to return to Britain, but she decided to stay in Hungary.

[5] When Germany invaded Hungary in March 1944, the SS began arranging the deportation of the country's Jews to Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the German extermination camp in occupied Poland.

In 1949 a Scottish minister, the Reverend David McDougall (1889–1964), editor of the Jewish Mission Quarterly,[9] published a 21-page booklet about her, Jane Haining of Budapest.

[10] According to Jennifer Robertson, writing in 2014 for PRISM: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators, almost all subsequent publications about Haining depend on McDougall's booklet.

[14][e] Educated at Dunscore village school, she won a scholarship to Dumfries Academy in 1909, as her older sisters Alison and Margaret had done, where she lived as a boarder in the Moat Hostel for Girls.

During this period, she lived at 50 Forth Street, Pollokshields, Glasgow, and attended the nearby Queen's Park West United Free Church, where she taught Sunday School.

In or around 1932 she responded to an advertisement in the Church of Scotland magazine Life and Work, looking for a matron for the girls' hostel attached to its Jewish mission school in Budapest.

Haining made efforts to have part of the building converted to club rooms, so that the evangelical work could continue for girls who had left the school, as most did when they were 14 or 15.

[27] When World War II broke out on 3 September 1939, Haining was on holiday in Cornwall with Margit Prém, the Hungarian head of the mission's elementary school.

We established a training school for prospective domestic servants and Miss Haining ... gave courses of lectures to Jewish refugees on British conditions.

"[36] On 19 March 1944, the German Wehrmacht invaded Hungary, and the SS immediately began arranging for the country's Jews to be deported to Auschwitz.

SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann and his Sondereinsatzkommando Ungarn ("special intervention unit Hungary") arrived in Budapest to take charge of the deportations.

[38] Jews over the age of six were required to wear a 10 x 10 cm yellow badge in the shape of the Star of David on the left chest of their outer clothing.

[39] In mid-April 1944 the SS began herding them into holding areas, including ghettos and brick factories, where they were held for weeks with little to eat.

[40] The Church of Scotland Jewish mission committee in Edinburgh wrote to the British Foreign Office around the time of the invasion of Hungary that it was "under a very deep debt of gratitude to Miss Jane Haining ... By her personal influence and faithfulness she has inspired such loyalty that the Budapest [Jewish] Mission has maintained its former high standards.

[45] Francis Lee wrote in July 1945 to Dr. Laszlo Nagy of the Hungarian Reformed Church: I remember very clearly the day she brought this list [of charges] from the Svabhegy prison where she had been "questioned": She read them out laughingly to me saying she had felt such a "stupid" repeating Ja, es ist wahr ["Yes, it is true"], after each accusation, except the sixth (that she had been involved in politics).

Ravasz also spoke to or met with the State Secretary Miklos Mester and the Hungarian prime minister, who, at the time of Haining's arrest, was Döme Sztójay.

Squeezed into the wagons in horrendous conditions, with little air, light, food or water, with buckets for latrines and no privacy, many people died during the journey.

[49] Gertrud "Trude" Levi was deported from Hungary to Auschwitz in 1944: The normal load for the trucks was 60–90 people, we were 120 ... We had two buckets for our human needs, we had to overcome our inhibitions to use them—men, women, strangers, children ... [W]ith every jolt of the train the muck ran out so we were sitting in it and we couldn't do a thing about it.

The crematoria could barely cope; the Sonderkommando (prisoners forced to work there) had to start burning bodies in open fire pits.

[51] About 90 per cent of the Hungarian Jews who survived the journey to Auschwitz were sent to the gas chambers on arrival; the rest were selected for slave labour.

Your loving Jean[56]According to a death certificate that arrived in Edinburgh on 17 August 1944, Haining died in hospital, presumably in Auschwitz, on 17 July 1944, two days after the date written in pencil on her card to Margit Prém.

Delivered courtesy of the German legation in Budapest and the Swiss government, the death certificate stated: "Miss Haining who was arrested on account of justified suspicion of espionage against Germany, died in hospital, July 17th, of cachexia following intestinal catarrh.

The final response he received was "a package which was delivered at the end of July to the Scottish Mission, and from which it could be ascertained that Miss Haining lost her life in a German concentration camp".

[h] Bishop Ravasz added to his letter: The Hungarian Reformed Church surrounded with sympathy and high esteem this frail and heroic-spirited lady.

Robertson writes that a 1944 Church of Scotland report stated that she had been sent to a "detention camp for women in Auschwitz in Upper Silesia", and her family's tombstone in the Irongray churchyard near Castle Douglas placed her death in Germany.

[62] In June 1948 two stained glass windows in her honour were installed in the vestibule of Queen's Park Govanhill Parish Church in Glasgow, where she worshipped.

[76] On 10 June 2021, the Scottish Episcopal Church at its General Synod voted to include Haining in its calendar of saints and heroes.