Legacy gift of $2M largest ever for Western Libraries - Western News

Western Libraries recently received its largest donation to date. A $2 million gift from the estate of Halina and James Russell (Rus) Robinson will give students and scholars access to rich resources in the emerging fields of military and veterans history.

The gift builds on a textbook and materials acquisition fund started by Rus in 1979, which Halina continued to support after his death in 2010 and until she died in 2021.

The donation came as a “complete surprise” to Elizabeth Mantz, who maintained regular contact with both Rus and Halina in her role as collections and content strategies librarian.

“I’m sure this was something they would have discussed and agreed upon as their legacy, but I had no idea they were planning to leave a donation of this kind,” Mantz said. “They were such a remarkable couple, very much committed to each other and similar in their gentle, unassuming ways.”

Making Western ‘a magnet for young researchers’

The bulk of the Robinsons’ endowment will fund materials in history and social science, with a special focus on military history.

The collection will include full-text access to two premier history databases, America: History and Life and Historical Abstracts, which offer comprehensive information on American, Canadian and world history.

Jonathan Vance, Distinguished University Professor and J.B. Smallman Chair in the department of history, said the signature collection created through Rus and Halina’s generosity will set Western apart.

“It gives students at all levels unparalleled access to the most important literature in military history, making Western a magnet for young researchers interested in the field,” Vance said.

“Every year, more and more digital databases are being marketed, but at considerable cost. This donation allows us to take advantage of the newest research resources as they become available, and boost Western’s profile, enabling us to take another step in becoming a leading research institution in North America for military history.”

  Western’s first PhD graduate in chemistry

For decades Rus made annual gifts to Western Libraries, inspired by his love of history and learning.

“He was very much an intellectual,” Halina told Western News in 2010. “He believed in education being the future for everybody and felt life was fuller with the more wisdom and information you acquired.”

Rus’ early donations allowed for the purchase of books on the history of radar, military applications and air force history, subjects reflective of his life and interests.

Rus grew up in Norwich, Ont., and after attending the Ontario Agriculture College in Guelph, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1941, training as a radio technician. During the Second World War, he travelled to England, France and Belgium, working on the ground with radar equipment, tracking enemy aircraft activity and helping direct Allied planes.

He attained the rank of Flight Lieutenant before he was severely injured in Belgium in November 1944. When he was well enough, he returned home to Canada and began his graduate studies at Western.

It was also at Western, that Halina caught Rus’ eye from across the cafeteria in the Natural Sciences Centre. Eventually, he asked her out. Romance blossomed and on August 1, 1953, shortly after Rus became Western’s first PhD graduate in chemistry, he and Halina married.

Rus stayed on at Western, teaching chemistry and working for Agriculture Canada until 1985, which had a site on campus. He authored more than 40 papers during that time.

A woman ahead of her time

Halina, the daughter of a Polish military officer, also survived the Second World War. When the war broke out, she and her mother fled to Warsaw, where Halina attended an underground school and later witnessed the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. After being arrested during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, Halina and her mother were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and from there deported to Bergen-Belsen – a Nazi concentration camp where approximately 50,000 imprisoned people died.

Despite grave illnesses brought on by the deplorable conditions at Auschwitz and later at Bergen-Belsen, the pair survived.

When Bergen-Belsen was liberated in 1945, Halina and her mother were sent as displaced persons to Sweden, where Halina studied – in Swedish, no less – to become a chemical engineer.

After graduating with high marks in 1950 from the Stockholms Tekniska Institut, Halina joined the famed Nobel-Karolinska Institute to work in the lab of pioneering cancer researchers Drs. George and Eva Klein. There she mastered white blood cell counting techniques used to assess chemotherapy drugs – a skill that would serve her well later on.

When Halina immigrated to Canada in 1951, she was intent on resuming her engineering career, but in 1951, London, Ont., like most of North America, was not yet accepting of female engineers. (Adding insult to injury, having sponsored her parents to come to Canada, Halina tried to buy them a house, only to learn that as a woman she’d need the mortgage co-signed by a man.)

Halina eventually landed a role as a laboratory technologist in the lab of former Western Faculty of Medicine dean James Bertram (J.B.) Collip. There, through her desire to maintain the skills she learned in Sweden, she made a groundbreaking – but unheralded observation – that led to the discovery of the anti-cancer drug Vinblastine. Read more about Halina’s discovery.

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Upon her retirement, Halina returned to creating art, a passion she was forced to forgo as a child, when her life was overtaken by war. She participated in a number of regional exhibitions, telling The Ingersoll Times in a 1983 interview that with all the suffering in the world, she hoped her art might “bring a smile to a person’s face.”

Besides volunteering at Museum London and taking courses in art history at Western, Halina also took the time to write her memoir, Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, released in 2020.

Though no stranger to remarkable hardship, Mantz remembers Halina as a “very positive person” and both she and Rus as dedicated and humble donors to Western, with a focus on giving students the materials they need to gain their education.

“This wonderful gift continues their legacy of doing remarkable things for people they’ve never met,” Mantz said. “It speaks to the lives they lived, and the power they had within.”