Upon the victory of the Spanish fascists and Francisco Franco, Schapiro escaped and attempted to hide in Nazi-occupied France, but he was quickly found by the Vichy authorities and handed over to the Nazis.

[2] In 1904 at the age of fourteen, he left the town and joined an anarchist militant group (akin to the Chernoznamentsy) who were rounded up by the authorities in 1905 after an unsuccessful attempt to murder Czar Nicholas II.

[1] He was one of a number of anarchists who spoke out against the representative system for electing the Constituent Assembly proposed by Alexander Kerensky's Russian Provisional Government, writing that "no parliament can break the path toward liberty, that the good society can be realized only through 'the abolition of all power'".

[2] Schapiro lead a tempestuous life in Russia between 1917 and 1921 in an atmosphere of increasing repression of anarchists by the Bolshevik regime, marrying a Jewish woman named Rachil, with whom he had a son, Dodek.

Due to the increasingly anti-Semitic environment in Europe at the time, the couple decided to give their son Alexander the surname of Grothendieck's well-established Hamburg middle-class family.

Forced to flee Germany after the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, and intent on fighting in the coming Spanish Civil War, the couple sent Alexander to live with the Heydorns, a middle-class family with anarchist sympathies, in 1933.

[1] In Spain, under the name Sacha Pietra, Schapiro fought the fascists until the defeat of the Second Spanish Republic, after which he and his wife crossed the French border and he was interned at Camp Vernet with his comrades.