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→Early years: rewording
==Life==
===Early years===
Alexander Schmorell was born in Orenburg, Russia, on [[September 16]], 1917 ([[September 3]] on the [[Julian Calendar]]), and was [[baptism|baptised]] in the [[Church of Russia|Russian Orthodox Church]]. His father, Hugo Schmorell, a doctor, was German and held German citizenship, although he had been born in Orenburg, Russia, and had lived there most of his life, except for a time when he studied medicine in Germany. His mother, Nataliya Vvedenskaya, was Russian, and was the daughter of a Russian Orthodox [[priest]] in or near Moscow. Dr. Schmorell had been practicing medicine in Moscow when he was forced to stop due to anti-German sentiment as a result of World War I. However, due to the great need of doctors in Russia, he was allowed to return to Orenburg to practice medicine there. With him came his new bride. Soon thereafter, in September 1917, a son, Alexander, was born to the couple. Although Hugo Schmorell was by confession Lutheran, he allowed his son to be baptized in the Orthodox Church. When Alexander was around a year old, his mother died of typhoid during an epidemic. Dr. Schmorell also then hired a Russian woman to be a nanny for his son. Her , a woman by the name was of Feodosiya Lapschina, and besides . Besides taking care of Alexander, she also was an Orthodox Christian, and took the boy to church and taught him about the Faith. Dr. Schmorell remarried in 1920. The woman whom he married, a nurse by the name of Elisabeth Hoffman, was also German, but, like Hugo Schmorell, she had grown up in Russia.
Hugo Schmorell and his family left Russia in 1921 in order to flee the Bolsheviks. With them came Feodosiya Lapschina, under the pretense that she was the widow of Hugo Schmorell's brother. (For this reason, she was buried with the name Franziska Schmorell.) The family settled in Munich, and soon afterward two children, Erich and Natascha, were born to Dr. Schmorell and his second wife.
Once the Schmorells were more established in Munich, their home, large enough to rightly be called a villa, was a meeting place among well-to-do Russian expatriates. Among the friends that they entertained there were members of the Pasternak family; [[w:Leonid Pasternak|Leonid Pasternak]] being a well-known painter in his own right, but was also the father to author [[w:Boris Pasternak|Boris Pasternak]]. (Leonid Pasternak had lived in Germany, along with his daughters, since 1921, but both of his sons remained in the Soviet Union.)
Young Alexander was a decent student, though in the beginning, he had to acclimate himself to German. At one point in his early school years, he was held back a year, but his stepmother seemed to believe this had more to do with anti-Russian sentiment than her stepson's academic ability, and so he switched schools and never had a problem after that. One early anecdote from his life comes from the compulsory religion classes in the Bavarian schools. Because the Bavarian schools only offered Catholic and Protestant religion classes, Alexander was placed in the religion class with the Catholic children. One teacher took exception to the way Alexander crossed himself (right to left, rather than left to right) and was adamant that Alexander, as "guest" in the class, should conform to the way they did things. Alexander refused.
===Third Reich days===