A farmer's daughter from Scotland, Jane Haining went to work at the Scottish Jewish Mission School in Budapest in 1932, where she was a boarding school matron in charge of around fifty orphan girls. Jane was back in the UK on holiday when war broke out in 1939, but she immediately went back to Hungary to do all she could to protect the four hundred children at the school, most of them Jewish. She refused to leave in 1940, and again ignored orders to flee the country in March 1944 when Hungary was invaded by the Nazis. She remained with her pupils, writing "if these children need me in days of sunshine, how much more do they need me in days of darkness."
