The Eagle Pharmacy

The Pod Orłem Pharmacy at 18 Bohaterów Getta Square is over a century old. From 1909, it was owned by Józef Pankiewicz, who was succeeded by his son Tadeusz, who ran it from 1933. When the Germans established a ghetto for Krakow's Jews in the Podgórze district in March 1941, the Pankiewicz pharmacy at Zgody Square was the only one within the ghetto, and its owner was the only Pole allowed to stay there permanently. The pharmacy became a meeting place for Jewish intellectuals, scientists and artists residing in the ghetto. Soon it also began to supply the ghetto inhabitants with a variety of remedies and medicines to help them avoid deportation: like hair dye, used to rejuvenate their appearance, or phenobarbital, which was used to soothe children hidden in hiding places or smuggled out of the ghetto in luggage.

Today, the Pharmacy houses a permanent exhibition of the Museum of Krakow, which is based on the memoirs of Tadeusz Pankiewicz first published just after the war in his book Apteka w getcie krakowskim. The exhibition occupies all the rooms of the former pharmacy, and the original utilitarian functions of the individual rooms form the basis for an analysis of the themes of the ghetto's history, the figure of Tadeusz Pankiewicz and Irena Droździkowska, Aurelia Danek-Czortowa and Helena Krywaniuk, who worked with him. In the dispatch room, the visitor will learn about the history of the place and its people, in the recipe room he will discover a variety of recipes for survival in the reality of the ghetto, in the duty room he will meet Tadeusz Pankiewicz, a witness and chronicler of the Holocaust, and in the material room he will feel the atmosphere of the Pharmacy as a meeting place and shelter for the inhabitants of the ghetto. Finally, in the laboratory, he will confront the post-war history of the memory and oblivion of Krakow's Jews.

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