Coco Schumann

Heinz Jakob "Coco" Schumann (14 May 1924 - 28 January 2018) was a German jazz guitarist. Schumann was born in Berlin, Germany. His father Alfred was Jewish by choice (a German Christian practicing convert to Judaism) and his mother Hedwig née Rothholz was Jewish by birth. Schumann became passionate about Swing after having heard it during the Berlin Olympics. He was transported first to Theresienstadt at the age of nineteen, where he became a member of the Ghettoswingers. 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 Coco where he came from and what he did, Schumann shouted, "Berlin, Herr Obersturmbanfuhrer! Plumber, Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer!" When the Americans dismantled the camps, liberation reached Coco almost too late: Just a few days before the end of the Nazi regime, he had contracted the dreaded spotted fever that had carried off his campmates by the hundreds, and he spent weeks fighting high fevers and delirious nightmares. He and one other man were the only ones to survive the sick bay. When he was finally able to return home to Berlin, he learned that his grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins had perished in the camps. But he found his parents alive. Coco’s father had ingeniously succeeded in keeping his Jewish wife hidden from the Nazis by declaring her dead after a disastrous fire. After the war, Coco Schumann became a celebrated Jazz guitarist. He played with Marlene Dietrich, Ella Fitzgerald, and Helmut Zacharias, among others, before founding his own Coco Schumann Quartett. Coco 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. Subject graphic novel has an unmistakable highly compelling "autobiographical/first-person account" narrative thread.