Holocaust Memorial Day: Remembering Jane Haining's remarkable story

The First Minister stated that we must resist the hate and prejudice that drives genocides and atrocities, and that is a lesson we must all take from today.

It is argued by many that Holocaust Memorial Day should mark other genocides, including that carried out by the Nazis against Polish gentiles in which more than two million people may have died.

The genocides in Armenia, Greece and Assyria during the final years of the Ottoman Empire, the killing of 60% of the Tutsi population of Rwanda in 1994, the slaughter of around a quarter of the population of Cambodia, now Kampuchea, in the 1970s, and many, many more massacres and attempted genocides have all occurred in the last century and show just how humanity’s greatest of evils can proliferate.

READ MORE: Jane Haining: The Scot who lived and died for Jewish children

Yet the Holocaust, the Shoah, is rightly acknowledged as being unique. Homosexuals, disabled people, the Roma, and political opponents of the Nazis were all rounded up and sent to concentration camps which few survived. Jews, however, were the victims of a genocidal racial extermination policy that was conceived by Hitler and delivered by a Nazi government that true to its nature kept meticulous damning records of its evil deeds.

There are still deluded fools who deny it ever happened, but the testimony of survivors and the extraordinary scenes of camps being liberated – some film of that time is still suppressed because it is too horrific to show – are all the proof needed to show the Holocaust’s true extent. There are very few Jewish survivors of the concentration camps left alive, most of them now very elderly, and so it is vitally important that their testimonies are listened to and that the Holocaust is never forgotten, hence this annual Memorial Day.

The date of January 27 was chosen more than 20 years ago as it was on that date in 1945 that the most infamous of the concentration camps at Auschwitz in occupied Poland was liberated. The Red Army of the USSR approached the camp not knowing what they would find. One general described the 7000 inmates as “living skeletons”.

One of those people killed at Auschwitz was Jane Haining, the only Scot who is remembered as one of the “Righteous Among The Nations” at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem.

Jane’s remarkable story of personal sacrifice has become more widely known in recent years, but I recall the reaction of many people when I wrote about here in the Sunday National in May, 2020 - “why did we not know more about her?”

She was a Christian missionary who cared for Jewish girls at a home and school in Budapest, the capital of Hungary. When the Germans took over Hungary in 1944, they began by forcing Jews to wear yellow stars on their clothing and then deported them to concentration camps. Jane refused to abandon her girls, as she called them, who were among the 450,000 Hungarian Jews who were sent to Auschwitz. She said: “If these children need me in days of sunshine, how much more do they need me in days of darkness?”

READ MORE: Scottish Second World War hero's efforts detailed in Mary Miller book

On April 25, 1944, Jane was arrested by the Gestapo and charged with aiding Jews. She was sent to Auschwitz where, despite protests from Hungarian clergy and politicians, she was forced to endure hard labour and starvation. She lasted just over three months before dying in the camp.

Hers is just one story out of millions killed in the Holocaust, but it needs to be told. I am delighted to report that a group of Scottish Christians and Jews are organising a project that will see Jane Haining commemorated in our schools. The educators involved will ensure that the pupils will learn the truth about the Holocaust, and in doing so will ensure that a fresh generation of Scots never forgets all those millions who died at Nazi hands.