A mayor adopted by a French and a German soldier

Photo Dave Parent
Eric Westram, Mayor of Rosemère

Dave Parent

Sunday, December 17, 2017 18:49

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Sunday, December 17, 2017 18:49

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The history of the new mayor of Rosemère is a hollywood scriptwriter. Born in Europe to an adolescent mother and entrusted to the orphanage, he was adopted by a French and a German that met during the horrors of the Second world War.

Eric Westram admits, it is a funny phenomenon because of her past in the least particular.

His biological mother was an adolescent Italian, who was put up for adoption when he was only four or five days in 1956.

“I’m a sort of mixture of citizens of the world, and I have kept this cultural side is very open,” he says.

Child soldier

The fate of Eric Westram has played on the fields of battle in France.

“My father was German and my mother French, they were one against the other. My father drove tanks, Panzer. It was part of the last wave of soldiers. Hitler felt that the war was lost. He took children, put a gun in his hands and he sent them to the front. My father had to be 16 or 17 years old when they put him in a tank, ” says the new mayor.

He also added that his adoptive father, Horst Walter Westram, did not share the philosophy of the nazis, quite the contrary. Under the totalitarian regime of Hitler, the German youth had no choice, it was in fields of battle or death.

Love during the war

This is after having been wounded and made prisoner as Horst Walter has met with Germaine, the woman with whom he will remain until the end of his days.

His tank was immobilized. On the way out, he did get shot in the back.

“After, my father found himself a prisoner in a farm in France and it was there that he met my mother, who was already an orphan”, said Mr. Westram.

“My parents left Europe with me to Quebec,” said the man, 61-year-old. The mayor, whose name at birth was Achile Faltreni, do not blame his biological mother for having entrusted to an orphanage. The adoption has allowed him to grow up in a close-knit family for whom education was of great importance.

“I can imagine a young Italian woman of 16 who becomes pregnant in a country very religious. It doesn’t have to be obvious. Let Me at the adoption was, according to me, a gesture extremely noble, ” concludes Mr. Westram.

-In collaboration with mylog.ca