Martin Tompa
Martin Tompa was born in 1952, and grew up in New Jersey surrounded by a close-knit family and the Austrian traditions his parents and relatives had brought with them to America. However, there was an important part of his family’s history that Martin knew little about growing up. He and his brother were raised Protestant, and the family’s Jewish identity and experiences during the Holocaust were never discussed.
Martin’s parents, Peter Tompa and Liesl Feiks grew up in Vienna. Nazi persecution scattered the two families in very different directions across Europe, to the Caribbean, and to Southeast Asia. Against remarkable odds, members of both families eventually made their way to New York, where their stories finally came together.
Only later in life did Martin begin to uncover this family history. His search through primary sources such as family photographs and documents, archival records, and conversations with people whose lives intersected with his relatives led him to stories that had gone untold in his family. That research became the book Odds of Survival, a work of historical fiction grounded in his family’s experiences before and during World War II.
Through Odds of Survival and his presentations, Martin explores family, identity, persecution, escape, and the combination of perseverance, circumstance, and good fortune that can determine who survives.
Martin is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where his work spanned theoretical computer science and computational molecular biology. He retired from the University of Washington in 2020.
