From then on, particularly from 1941, Jewish refugees from all over German-occupied Europe began arriving in Hungary to escape the Holocaust. According to McDougall, Haining wrote to someone in or around 1938: "What a ghastly feeling it must be to know that no one wants you and to feel that your neighbours literally grudge you your daily bread." According to one colleague, she would rise at 5 am on market days to find food for the home and would carry the heavy bags back herself. She is reported to have cut up her leather suitcase to repair the girls' shoes. A pupil at the school told a filmmaker decades later: "We understood even as third-graders, that we are protected here, we are not harmed, we are protected, and we are equals. We could see, we could understand this, because they behaved accordingly."