The Pharmacy Under the Eagle: Krakow's Most Defiant WWII Story You've Never Heard

Most visitors to Krakow follow the well-worn path to Schindler's Factory on Lipowa Street, and rightly so — it's a magnificent museum. But a short tram ride away, tucked into the corner of Plac Bohaterów Getta (Heroes of the Ghetto Square) in the Podgórze district, sits a building whose story is just as extraordinary, and far less crowded.

This is Apteka Pod Orłem — the Eagle Pharmacy — and if Krakow has a monument to quiet, daily courage, this is it.

A Pharmacy That Refused to Close

When the Nazi occupation authorities established the Kraków Ghetto in March 1941, they forced over 15,000 Jewish residents into a cramped quarter of Podgórze, sealed behind a distinctive limestone wall — sections of which still stand today on Lwowska Street. Every Polish-owned business inside the ghetto boundaries was ordered to relocate outside the walls. Every business, that is, except one.

Tadeusz Pankiewicz, a Polish Catholic pharmacist, made the remarkable decision to petition the authorities to remain. His reasoning, officially accepted, was practical: the ghetto's residents needed access to medicine. What the authorities didn't fully reckon with was that Pankiewicz would use that pharmacy as something far more important than a dispensary.

For nearly three years, the Eagle Pharmacy became an unofficial refuge, an information hub, and a lifeline. Pankiewicz and his three female assistants — Irena Droździkowska, Aurelia Danek, and Helena Krywaniuk — provided not just medicine but hair dye (to help people change their appearance and escape), forged documents passed under the counter, and a quiet room where desperate people could simply sit and feel, for a moment, like human beings. Pankiewicz witnessed and later documented Akcja Kraków, the brutal liquidation deportations of 1942 and 1943, becoming one of the most important eyewitness chroniclers of ghetto life.

In 1983, Yad Vashem recognized Pankiewicz as Righteous Among the Nations. His book, The Kraków Ghetto Pharmacy, published in Polish in 1947, remains essential reading.

Visiting the Eagle Pharmacy Today

The museum is operated by the Historical Museum of the City of Kraków and is genuinely one of the most thoughtfully curated small museums in Poland. The ground floor has been preserved to resemble the pharmacy as it looked during the occupation — dark wooden cabinets, original apothecary jars, the worn counter where so many quiet transactions of survival took place. Upstairs, exhibitions use photographs, documents, and personal testimonies to reconstruct ghetto life in human-scale detail rather than overwhelming statistics.

Practical details worth knowing: entry costs 14 PLN for adults and 12 PLN for students, with free entry on Tuesdays. The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday, and I'd strongly recommend arriving when it opens at 10:00 AM — by early afternoon, school groups tend to arrive. Budget about 90 minutes; rushing it would be a disservice.

After your visit, walk the square itself. Plac Bohaterów Getta is studded with 33 oversized metal chairs — a haunting installation by artists Piotr Lewicki and Kazimierz Łatak commemorating the ghetto's victims, each chair representing the furniture left behind during deportations. It's one of the most affecting public memorials in Europe, and somehow more powerful for being in the middle of an ordinary, lived-in neighborhood rather than a dedicated memorial park.

For context before or after, the Ghetto Wall fragments on Lwowska Street (a 5-minute walk away) are easy to miss but worth finding — look for the small plaques near the housing estate entrance.

The Insider Tip

Combine this visit with the Schindler's Factory Museum on the same day — they're a 12-minute walk apart — but visit the Eagle Pharmacy first. It sets a more intimate, human-scale tone that makes the larger museum's scope feel even more meaningful. Pick up Pankiewicz's book in the museum shop before you leave; the Polish edition costs around 35 PLN, and an English translation is available online. It will change how you see the city.