Coco Schumann

Heinz Jakob "Coco" Schumann (14 May 1924 – 28 January 2018) was a German jazz musician and Holocaust survivor. He became a member of the Ghetto Swingers while transported to Theresienstadt at the age of nineteen. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Schumann performed as a jazz guitarist, with Marlene Dietrich, Ella Fitzgerald, and Helmut Zacharias.

Early life Schumann was born in Berlin, Germany, into a bourgeois family. His father, Alfred Schumann, was a war veteran. German by ethnicity and Christian by upbringing, he converted to Judaism after marrying his Jewish wife. His nickname, "Coco," came from his French girlfriend who could not pronounce his first name. During his teenage years, he played for various swing bands and taught himself to play guitar and drums.

Holocaust years

Schumann was transported first to Theresienstadt at the age of nineteen, where he became a member of the Ghetto Swingers. Finally he and Martin Roman were transported to Auschwitz, where he came face to face with Josef Mengele. When Mengele inquired of the blue-eyed, nineteen-year-old Schumann where he came from and what he did, Schumann shouted, "Berlin, Herr Obersturmbannführer! Plumber, Herr Obersturmbannführer!"

Just a few days before the end of the Nazi regime, Schumann contracted spotted fever that had killed hundreds of co-prisoners, and he spent weeks fighting high fevers and delirious nightmares. He and one other man were the only ones to survive the illness. When he was finally able to return home to Berlin, he learned that his grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins had been murdered in the camps. However he found his parents alive, as his father had ingeniously succeeded in keeping his Jewish wife hidden from the Nazis by declaring her dead after a disastrous fire.

Career After the war, Schumann became a celebrated jazz guitarist. Schumann's eventful and colorful life is a subject of and is celebrated in a German-language true-to-life color graphic novel by Caroline Gille and Niels Schröder. His autobiography, The Ghetto Swinger: A Berlin Jazz-Legend Remembers, was first published in 1997 and became a bestseller. In 2012 it was staged as a musical in Hamburg.