Sam Sperling

Born: May 5, 1960

Died: March 27, 2015.

Sam Sperling, who has died aged 54, was an extraordinary thinker, mathematician, the driving force behind a book about the experiences of his father during the Holocaust and my close friend for more than 40 years. He died after a long and secretive battle with cancer.

He was born in Glasgow in 1960 to two Holocaust survivors, and suffered emotionally and psychologically throughout his life. At the same time, he possessed insights into the human condition known only to those who had witnessed the worst Mankind has to offer.

As the child of Holocaust survivors, one of whom committed suicide, his death by cancer will seem a particular cruelty to those who knew him.

Yet Sam's compassion and humanity, as well as his zany and anarchic sense of humour, were felt by all those with whom he came into contact - whether it was an immigrant waiter in a frequented restaurant, the newsagent around the corner, a university professor or old friends.

One minute he might insist to a local shopkeeper that he was owed £5 million instead of £5 in change, while the next he would be discussing astrophysics with a counter attendant at a pizzeria.

After a phone call with Sam in January 2005, while the world was commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, he agreed to help guide me through the writing of a book about his father.

My book, Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling, could not have been written without him. He did more than provide information. His highly critical mind and his tears lent a universal morality to the work. His preface remains one of the most beautiful pleas to the human race I have ever read.

His father, a survivor of seven Nazi camps, used to say: "Auschwitz was nothing." To him, Treblinka was the most murderous place on Earth. Its terrors never left him and were passed on - as if genetically - to Sam and his brother.

Yet, in spite of the depth of his suffering, there was no bitterness - only a kind of disappointment and sorrow that the world could do no better.

He grew up on the south side of Glasgow, but I remember his parents' home was like no other. Instead of a suburban house in Newton Mearns, it might have been a shtetl sometime in the early 20th century. The language was not English, but Yiddish. The food was not Scottish, but Jewish and Polish.

Also, the behaviour was decidedly not British. If you opened a kitchen cupboard, tin cans were piled to the ceiling. It looked as though the family was preparing for a siege. The Gestapo was coming at any minute.

Sam's love of maths began with a childhood obsession for the blue-black Auschwitz tattoo on his father's arm. From an early age, he added, subtracted, multiplied and divided manifold combinations of the numbers into themselves.

For most of his life, his education was patchy. He attended Calderwood Lodge primary school, Scotland's only Jewish school, and then transferred to secular Williamwood and Eastwood high schools, neither of which recognised his abilities nor his anguish. He left at 17 and began an English literature degree at the University of Stirling, which he abandoned after a few months.

Unable to cope with the pressure of study and the anxiety at home, he escaped to Israel and then Denmark, studying computer science along the way. Within a few years, he added fluency in Danish and Hebrew to his linguistic skills in English and Yiddish. After his return to the UK, his gift for mathematical problem solving made him one of the computer industry's most sought after troubleshooters.

Then, in his mid 40s, he decided to take up physics, and achieved a B.Sc. first-class honours from the Open University. He had a particular interest in quantum mechanics, the physics of sub-atomic particles. He was also passionate about the Open University's goal of providing educational access to all, regardless of circumstance or background, and expressed a desire to teach there in the future.

In 2011, he was awarded a Ph.D at University of London Kings College in climate science and geography. His thesis, funded by a scholarship from the Natural Environmental Research Council, delved into the study of global wildfires using satellite observations and atmospheric chemistry modeling.

His comedic sense never left him and he could talk what he liked to call "jabberwocky" for hours with children and the highly educated alike. His sense of the absurd was based on the notion that the human race could not stop itself from behaving ridiculously.

In spite of his humanity, his personal relationships and friendships were often difficult. Most of his close friends found out about his cancer just four days before his death. Those who knew were sworn to secrecy and told that the sympathy of friends "would not change the outcome".

Yet his contribution to my book stands as a testament to the suffering of an entire generation of European Jews, who were not even born during the Second World War, but remained tormented by Hitler's legacy.

He did not marry and did not have children, because, as he put it, he "didn't want to do to their lives," what his parents had inadvertently done to his and his brother's.

In the preface to my book, his words from 2010 now appear strangely prophetic: "Anti-Semitism, the theme of this story, is only one manifestation of evil... The herd can still be manipulated into acts of unspeakable evil, and if we cannot learn from the Holocaust, what will it take?"

The world has lost a brilliant mind and an extraordinarily compassionate soul. He leaves behind his elder brother, Alan, and the many who were touched by his life.

MARK S SMITH