A leading Jewish jazz musician, Coco Schumann recently performed to a sold out concert hall in Berlin’s Jewish Museum.

Schumann, 81, survived “hell”, as he put it, as a member of Theresienstadt’s “Ghetto Swingers” and later Auschwitz’s “The Happy Five” bands.

The artist says he survived the war thanks to his music music. “I had barely arrived in Theresienstadt and I already started doing what I always did – making music,” Schumann writes in his book, “The Ghetto Swinger”, in which he describes his wartime experiences.

“I did not look away [from the children] on their way to the gas chambers,” he adds elsewhere, explaining that the band used the German version of the nostalgic Spanish song, “La Paloma”, when people were marched to the gas chambers.

He was one of only four of 16 band members to survive the Nazi atrocities.

Fame through Survival

Schumann’s survival led him to fame. “One of the proudest moments of my life”, he told the audience, “was when the great conductor Herbert von Karajan, in front of hundreds of distinguished guests exclaimed, ‘I don’t know who Coco Schumann is’.”

Schumann told EJP that the past few months have been extremely busy for him. “I am continually rushing off from one interview to the other, between performances […].

Everyone has been wanting to interview me because of the 60th anniversary of the end of WWII. I believe that I am the last surviving musician from that time.”

Youthful and Serene

It was the third summer in a row that the guitarist performed as part of Berlin’s summer festival. Young and old sat side by side, their shoulders and feet bopped non-stop to the rhythm of the quartet’s music.

Age has visibly slowed down Schumann’s fingers and agility. Nevertheless, EJP could not help but notice the smiles on everyone’s face. Schumann was serene, youthful, playful and perhaps even forgiving – despite his age. He continuously connected to everyone in the audience by looking each one of them in the eyes.

Schumann has always concentrated on the American big band genre. He only performed two of his own compositions. Otherwise, he played own arrangements of nearly every great jazz and big band composer of the 1930s and 1940s.

After the war, Schumann first emigrated to Australia, before returning home to Berlin. He remembered the people who helped him and his family in the desperate times. “That is the reason I could not collectively blame Germans for what happened then,” he wrote.

To this day, the artist earns his living making music. He says he never looks back and prefers to focus on the present and future.