From Holocaust survivor to international fame - and East Haddam

David Alexandre Winter is an acclaimed performer here and in Europe.

By Nancy Thompson

The Gold and Platinum records mounted on the walls of David Alexandre Winter’s recording studio at his home in Moodus tell the story of his international fame as a singer-songwriter with millions of records sold throughout Europe. They do not, however, tell of good fortune and bad, family lost and found and perseverance in the face of adversity that is the story of his life.

Winter - then known as Lion Kleerekoper - was born in Amsterdam in 1943 to Jewish parents. They were aware of the ongoing deportations to German camps and had heard they would be sent away the following week.

“In the good days before the war, my parents had a German maid,” Winter said. “She agreed to take me from my mother. My mother walked up to her on the street when I was five months old and handed me to her.”

In time, the woman was betrayed by neighbors who told the Germans she was hiding a Jewish child, and he eventually was one of 4,000 children deported on a German “Kindertransport” train to Bergen-Belsen. In a stroke of luck, the commander there, a man who was disgusted by the Nazi regime was the maid’s uncle and agreed to hide little Lion under the floorboards in his office. He spent a year and a half there, cared for by compassionate guards and others, until the British liberated the camp at the end of the war.

At that point, the family was scattered. His mother was in Sweden after escaping in a garbage tub filled with potato peelings, and his father was in a Russian hospital recovering from pleurisy that he contracted during a forced march in which he saw his father murdered. But because the Germans kept such good records of where prisoners were, the Red Cross was able to track down little Lion and both his parents and by the end of 1946 the family had been reunited.

“It was amazing, what they did,” Winter said of the Red Cross workers.

Before long, he discovered that he was charming and could get whatever he wanted by performing.

“At age five I would put on plays for my family. I wasn’t a chest thumper, I was humble. I loved being on stage. The biggest thrill was being in front of an audience and making people happy. It’s what I do. I love what I do.” he said.

His father, an economics professor, didn’t think entertainment was a worthy career choice for his son. “He told me to stay and play by his rules or leave,” Winter recalled. “I left. I had no choice.”

At 13 he left for England, where he found a job as a disc jockey on one of the 227 Radio ships transmitting rock music to England and the Netherlands, where it was banned, from the North Sea. Two years later Philips Records offered him a contract to do two recordings a year, but because he was a minor, he needed his parents’ signature and they refused.

After Winter joined Daddy’s Act, a popular English act, as lead singer he had an idea that led to a number one single with the help of Paul McCartney.

“I wanted to take ‘Eight Days a Week’ and slow it down into a blues song,” he said.

He contacted the popular Beatle and got his permission for his arrangement. The song reached No. 1 on the charts and sold almost 7 million records abroad.

He lived for a while at the home of Graeme Hall, a British musical director, producer, and arranger, at his home in the Kensington area of London alongside Olivia Newton-John and her sister Rhona and Cat Stevens. “All of us were trying to make it,” he said.

In 1967 he was invited to represent England in the International Songfest in Innsbruck, Austria and won the competition. From there, his career skyrocketed.

Norbert Aleman, a French producer, invited him to join him in France, promising, “We’ll make you a star.”

The song was “Oh, Lady Mary” and it did in fact make Winter a star, with 3.7 million copies sold in France and another 4 million copies in other languages in Europe. Other No. 1 hits followed. “I’d gone from a nobody to an overnight success,” he said.

In the late 1970s, Winter came to the U.S. He was known in Europe as “the French Tom Jones” but was a relative unknown here.

“Any European artist wants to make it in America,” he said. “If you want to make it and have people respect you, you have to make it in America.”

It wasn’t easy. He started doing some gigs in Florida and venues like the Tropicana in Atlantic City and Las Vegas. He got married, spent two and a half years in Nashville, and wrote songs for Mary Tyler Moor Music. His wife’s mother in Massachusetts became ill, so they moved there and Winter took a job working for Herb Chambers’ car dealership.

“Herb Chambers was a really, really nice guy,” Winter said. “He let me go to France for at least two months every year on tour and write an album.”

In 2010 he spent eight months a year in France touring, drawing 25,000 people a day, most in their 70s and 80s. His wife died and he retired, but not completely. “I started doing concerts last year,” he said. “I never really retired from show business.”

He’s still recording at his home recording studio and doing performances locally.

David Alexandre Winter will present “April in Paris April” 25 at 7 p.m. at the Hadlyme Public Hall, 63 Ferry Rd. in Hadlyme. Tickets are $40 and are available online at davidalexandrewinter.com