A Scot who gave her life to help protect Jewish schoolgirls during the Holocaust must never be forgotten, the Princess Royal has said. She d
A Scot who gave her life to help protect Jewish schoolgirls during the Holocaust must never be forgotten, the Princess Royal has said.
She described Jane Haining, who was murdered in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, as an inspiration whose “devotion to duty is a lesson to us all”.
Princess Anne spoke of her admiration for the Church of Scotland missionary who is the subject of an online lecture hosted by St Columba’s Church in London at 6.30pm this evening.
It is being delivered by Mary Miller who wrote a book about Miss Haining, the matron of the Scottish Mission girls’ boarding school in Budapest, Hungary from 1932-1944.
Princess Anne, patron of the Scots in London Association, said: “Jane Haining is an inspirational subject whose devotion to duty is a lesson to us all.
“Jane’s determination and resolution in looking after her young charges at the Scottish Mission School in Budapest, at the eventual cost of her own life, is an example of service over self that deserves to be told and remembered.
“The lecture by Mary Miller, who herself has looked after deprived children in Glasgow, will be poignant but we can take heart from the knowledge that Jane’s life will be honoured.”
Miss Haining, who grew up in Dunscore near Dumfries, refused to abandon the Jewish girls in her care - many of them orphans - when the Second World War broke out in 1939.
She sheltered them for more than four years until she was arrested and eventually taken to Auschwitz in Nazi occupied Poland where she died at the age of 47, six months before it was liberated in 1945.
