Westhill Humanities

Scotland has installed its first Stolperstein, honouring Jane Haining, a Scottish woman who chose to stay in Budapest during the war to protect Jewish children and was murdered in Auschwitz for it. Haining left Edinburgh in 1932 to care for girls at a school run by the Scottish Mission to the Jews. Even after being urged to return home, she refused, insisting she “must stay with the girls.” After the Nazi invasion of Hungary, she was arrested for working with Jewish people and even for crying as she helped the children sew yellow stars onto their clothes. She was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and died there at 47. The new Stolperstein was laid outside St Stephen’s Church in Edinburgh, where she had been blessed before leaving for Budapest. A small brass stone that invites passers-by to pause, remember, and reflect on a life of extraordinary courage. Stolpersteine — “stumbling stones” — are now the world’s largest decentralised memorial to victims of Nazism, placed so that we literally encounter their stories under our feet.