Thomas Nartker was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio. He attended grade school and high school there, and then attended the University of Dayton. He majored in chemical engineering. By the time Nartker was a sophomore in college, He had already been accepted for graduate study at the University of Tennessee.

Author, speaker, and Holocaust survivor Stephen Nasser was born in 1931 in Hungary. As a child he was known as Pista, which translates to Stephen in English. He and his family were forced into a ghetto in 1943. They were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau shortly after, where Nasser witnessed the murder of several relatives. He was liberated from a death train on April 30, 1945 by General Patton’s Third Army.