Schwartz was born on May 13, 1926 in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He attended Colorado Military School in Denver, Colorado and the University of Southern California. He left the university without a degree and went into the merchant tailoring business in Los Angeles, California. After that business went bankrupt, he moved to Las Vegas, Nevada with his brother, Seymour Schwartz, around 1951 and started Schwartz Brothers Clothing.

Lyn Robinson was born January 16, 1978 in Florida. She moved to Las Vegas, Nevada in 1999 and became a student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). She was an art major with a concentration on photography. Robinson also had a deep appreciation of the horror of the Holocaust and what the survivors she would take photos of had endured. This began a two year project, during which she took photos of over sixty survivors. Robinson’s images were displayed at the Sperling Kronberg Mack Holocaust Resource Center.