Sally Magnusson goes in search of Jane Haining, a courageous yet astonishingly little-known Scottish heroine of the Second World War. The story begins in Dunscore, Dumfries and Galloway — where Haining was born in 1897 — and ends behind the barbed-wire of Auschwitz, where she was imprisoned after being convicted on trumped-up charges of espionage and sympathising with the Jews during her time as matron of the Scottish Mission School in Budapest. She died a few months later in July 1944.

We follow Sally’s journey as she pieces together a picture of this quiet, self-effacing woman who left Scotland to become the matron of a Hungarian girls’ school in 1932 and found herself providing the Jewish girls and orphans under her charge with love and security in a world that was becoming increasingly dangerous and hate-filled.  Despite multiple pleas from the Church of Scotland for her to return, Haining refused to abandon her post as the war intensified and the Nazis took over Hungary. That decision cost her her life.