Coco Schumann was a jazz musician who was forced to play the guitar in Auschwitz as victims were selected for the gas chamber
Coco Schumann, who has died aged 93, was always at pains to stress that he was, as he put it, “a musician who spent time in a concentration camp, not a concentration camp prisoner who made music”. He said that music had defined his life, and he was convinced it was music that had been responsible for his survival.
Partly out of a wish not to allow the Nazis a prominent place in his biography, and because he thought no one would believe his story, and partly because of the horrors he had witnessed during the more than two years he spent incarcerated, it took him more than half a century to talk about the experience. “For years I didn’t speak about it, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Dachau, I thought no one would believe I had been in those places,” he said in 2014.
But one day, at an event for concentration camp survivors in the mid-1980s, someone challenged him. “He said to me, if you don’t speak about it, who will tell people what really happened there? And in that moment a switch turned on in me, and I thought he was right,” Schumann said. He became increasingly aware of the importance of his role as one of the last remaining “first voice” eye-witnesses of the Holocaust.
Schumann was infected by the jazz bug at the age of 13, when a friend played him Ella Fitzgerald’s new record A-Tisket A-Tasket, at a time when people held secret gramophone sessions with their friends to savour a music genre that had been officially classed as Negermusik (literally nigger music) and therefore “degenerate” by the Nazis. He taught himself the guitar and went on to make his name in Berlin’s underground jazz scene, where he regularly performed as a minor in a Gypsy swing band.
Owing to his father’s conversion to Judaism out of love for his mother, Schumann was classified as a Geltungsjude, or a person considered a Jew by law, and lived in permanent fear of being deported.
His first close shave came in 1942 when a group of SS officers entered the Berlin bar where he was playing, to arrest a Jewish member of the audience. Convinced of his own imminent capture, Schumann recalled approaching one of the officers and saying: “If you’re going to arrest him, you might as well arrest me too.” When asked why, he replied: “First of all I’m Jewish, secondly, I’m underage, and thirdly, I’m playing jazz.” He was ignored until a year later, after – so he always suspected – a romantic rival and a regular in the Rosita bar, where he often played, informed on him.
Schumann was transported in 1943 to Theresienstadt, in what is now Terezin, Czech Republic. There, aged 19, he began playing in a band called the Ghetto Swingers, founded by the Czech trumpeter Eric Vogel. In September 1944, they were given clean white shirts to perform in a propaganda film – an extension of a hoax played on the Red Cross the previous summer pretending that Jews had a decent life in the camp – to show the breadth of cultural activities on offer in the so-called “settlement”. The 20 minutes of the film that survives includes footage of the band leader, Martin Roman, and his elegant Ghetto Swingers performing in a bucolic scene in a pavilion in the park.
Immediately after, Schumann was deported to Auschwitz, along with other cast members and the director, Kurt Gerron, and his wife. There, thanks to a musician friend who recognised him, he was commandeered into a swing band that had the job of accompanying the tattooing of new arrivals and the selection process for the gas chambers, both to ease the SS guards’ boredom and to prevent panic among those who should not know they were going to their deaths. On a guitar that had belonged to a murdered Romani musician, Schumann was forced to play requests from the soldiers for hours at a time, everything from La Paloma to Alexander’s Ragtime Band. He later said he had always avoided the gazes of the children.
Born Heinz Schumann in Berlin, to Alfred, a decorator, and Hedwig (nee Rothholz), a hairdresser, he inherited a drum kit from his Uncle Arthur who was emigrating to Bolivia, and a six-string guitar from a cousin called up to the Wehrmacht. Heinz got his nickname, Coco, from a French girlfriend.
Having survived Auschwitz, where he nearly died from spotted fever, and then Dachau, Schumann was liberated by American troops in Bavaria while on a death march towards Innsbruck, and returned to his home city. His autobiography, The Ghetto Swinger: A Berlin Jazz-Legend Remembers (1997), which was turned into a musical in 2012, described being received back in the bars and clubs he had previously played in, as if he were a ghost appearing. “Everyone was surprised I’d survived,” he said.
It was while wandering down the bombed-out Kurfürstendamm boulevard in 1945 that Schumann met his future wife, Gertraud Goldschmidt, who approached him after recognising him as a member of the Ghetto Swingers from the time she herself had spent in Theresienstadt.
In 1950 he emigrated with Gertraud and her son to Australia, returning, homesick, in 1954, and subsequently spent years performing as a musician on cruise ships or playing with dance bands and radio ensembles and accompanying among others, Marlene Dietrich, Ella Fitzgerald and Helmut Zacharias. But he rarely revealed much about his past, saying: “I didn’t want to think people were applauding me out of sympathy.” In the 1990s, buoyed by the nostalgic comeback of swing, he formed the Coco Schumann Quartet, which enjoyed success and earned him considerable attention.
He was quick-witted, warm and charming, with a string of homemade bons mots always to hand, which one friend habitually recorded in a notebook that was published as a book, Coco, in 2015. In recent years, he suffered a brain tumour and that, and an injury to his finger following a fall in the summer of 2014, more or less put paid to performing in public. But he never stopped his daily habit of plucking at one of the many electric guitars he kept around his Berlin bungalow.
His 90th birthday was marked by a tribute gala put on by Germany’s cultural and political elite. Asked once how he managed to continue performing the very melodies he was forced to play in Auschwitz, that accompanied people to their deaths, Schumann replied: “Why should the music be tainted for the fact it was violated by the Nazis?” He added: “The pictures that burned themselves into my memory in Auschwitz are something I am forced to endure the whole time, regardless of whether I’m playing the tunes or not.”
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