Old Photograph Dunscore Scotland


Old photograph of cottages and houses in Dunscore, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. Dunscore is the birthplace of the Church of Scotland missionary Jane Haining, one of only ten Holocaust victims from Scotland. Jane was born at Lochenhead Farm in Dunscore, Dumfriesshire. She was the fifth child of Thomas Haining, a farmer, and his first wife, Jane Mathison, a farmer's daughter. She grew up as a member of the evangelical Craig church in Dunscore, Reformed Presbyterian until 1876, then Free Church of Scotland until 1900, and then United Free Church). She was educated at the village school, and won a scholarship to Dumfries Academy in 1909. She trained at the commercial college of Glasgow Athenaeum, and worked for 10 years as a secretary at a thread maker's in Paisley. She lived in Pollokshields in Glasgow and attended Queen's Park West United Free Church. She volunteered for service as a missionary in 1932, becoming matron of the girls' home at the Scottish Mission School in Budapest, Hungary. She was holidaying in Cornwall, England, in 1939 when the Second World War broke out and she immediately returned to Budapest. She was ordered to return to Scotland in 1940 but refused, determined to remain with her girls. After the German occupation of Hungary, its former allies in March 1944, she again refused to leave. She was arrested in April 1944 and detained by the Gestapo, accused, among other things, of working among Jews and listening to the BBC. She admitted all the charges, except those of political activity. She was detained at Fő utca prison in Buda, and then moved to a holding camp in Kistarcsa. She was sent to Auschwitz in May 1944, where she was tattooed as prisoner 79467. She sent a last postcard on 15 July 1944, and died " in hospital " at Auschwitz on 17 July 1944, of " cachexia following intestinal catarrh ", strangely her name is not recorded in the Auschwitz Death Books published by the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum. She is one of a total of ten Scots, including two or three women, thought to have died in the Nazi extermination camps.



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