Sascha Schapiro - Life in Europe, Family and Death

Life in Europe, Family and Death

By 1922, Schapiro had reached Berlin, where he remained save for spells in Paris and Belgium until 1924. There, he assumed the name Sacha Piotr and throughout the 1920s was an active participant in the anarchist movement, in 1928 becoming friends with prominent Spanish anarcho-syndicalists Francisco Ascaso and Buenaventura Durruti, Italian anarchist Francesco Ghezzi and German author Theodor Plievier, who dedicated his 1927 novel Stienka Rasin to Schapiro. In Paris, he was a regular at the artist's hangout Café Dome, and befriended journalist and artist Aron Brzezinski, who made a bronze bust of him, as well as the novelist Scholem Asch. During this period was in infrequent contact with Makhno and his platformist Dielo Truda group, who were based in Paris. Schapiro was one of the founding members, alongside Sébastien Faure, Ugo Fedeli and Henryk Walecki, of the Paris-based Œuvres Internationales Des Editions Anarchistes (International Works of Anarchist Editions). He contributed at least two articles to the publication, run at that time by the anarchist Severin Ferandel.

Schapiro met his wife, anarchist journalist Hanka Grothendieck, through the movement in Berlin while working as a street photographer. Due to the increasingly anti-Semitic environment in Europe at the time, the couple decided to give their son Alexandre 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 Alexandre to live with the Heydorns, a middle-class family with anarchist sympathies, in 1933. 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. The Heydorns had cared for Alexandre in Berlin for seven years, but decided in May 1939, shortly before France entered the Second World War, that it had become too dangerous to keep him and he was put on a train to Paris to his parents. In Occupied Paris, Schapiro was free for a short time, constantly active in the anarchist movement, until he was arrested and deported to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942, where he was afterward murdered by the Nazis.