The Pharmacy Under the Eagle: Krakow's Most Dangerous Act of Resistance in the Krakow Ghetto

Most visitors to Krakow tick off Wawel Castle and St. Mary's Basilica before heading to Auschwitz-Birkenau for a day trip, and all of those are worthwhile. But there's a story unfolding just across the Vistula River, in the district of Podgórze, that tends to stop people completely in their tracks — and it happens inside a single preserved pharmacy on Plac Bohaterów Getta (Heroes of the Ghetto Square).

The Man Who Refused to Leave

When the German occupation authorities established the Krakow Ghetto in March 1941, they drew its borders around a section of Podgórze and ordered all non-Jewish residents to vacate. Tadeusz Pankiewicz, a Polish Catholic pharmacist, owned the only pharmacy inside those borders — Pod Orłem, meaning Under the Eagle, located at Plac Bohaterów Getta 18. He was given the legal right to leave. He chose to stay.

For the next two years, until the ghetto's brutal liquidation in March 1943, Pankiewicz and his three female assistants ran the pharmacy as a de facto refuge. They provided medicine, sometimes for free or at reduced cost, to ghetto residents who had been stripped of their livelihoods and assets. They smuggled news from the outside world. They passed messages, documents, and occasionally people. The pharmacy became a meeting point for the Krakow intelligentsia trapped inside, a place where a semblance of normal human dignity could briefly be maintained.

Pankiewicz kept meticulous notes, and after the war he published a memoir called The Krakow Ghetto Pharmacy — one of the most important first-hand accounts of ghetto life ever written. In 1983, Yad Vashem recognized him as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.

Visiting the Museum Today — What to Actually Do

The pharmacy has been preserved as a branch of the Historical Museum of Krakow and is one of the most carefully curated small museums in Poland. The original fixtures — wooden counters, apothecary cabinets, glass bottles — remain largely intact, giving the space an immediacy that larger institutions can struggle to achieve. The exhibits layer archival photographs, personal testimonies, and period objects to walk you through ghetto life month by month.

Practical details worth knowing: entry costs 21 PLN for adults and 18 PLN for students and seniors (free on Mondays). The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday, generally from 10:00 to 17:00, but hours shift seasonally so check the muzeumkrakowa.pl website before you go. Plan to spend at least 90 minutes here — rushing it does a disservice to what you're seeing.

After the museum, take twenty minutes to walk Plac Bohaterów Getta itself. The square is marked with 70 oversized metal chairs — one for each thousand Jews deported from this square — a memorial designed by Piotr Lewicki and Kazimierz Łatak that is deceptively simple and genuinely haunting. From there, walk five minutes along Ulica Lwowska to see the remaining fragments of the ghetto wall on Ulica Limanowskiego — two sections of the original boundary wall still stand, built in the shape of Jewish tombstones, a deliberate cruelty that historians have documented but that somehow hits harder when you're standing in front of it.

If you want to go deeper, the Schindler's Factory Museum is a 10-minute walk away on Ulica Lipowa 4 (entry 32 PLN), but I'd suggest visiting the pharmacy first — it gives you an intimate, human-scale introduction to this history before the larger exhibition.

The Insider Tip You Won't Find in Guidebooks

Most tourists arrive at the pharmacy between 11:00 and 14:00. If you can get there when it opens at 10:00 on a weekday, you'll often have the rooms almost entirely to yourself for the first 30 to 40 minutes — and in a space this charged, silence matters enormously. Bring cash for the entry fee, as the card reader has been unreliable. And before you leave Podgórze, stop for coffee at Cafe Rekawka on Ulica Brodzińskiego — a quiet, local spot where almost nobody speaks English, which, after the morning you'll have just had, feels exactly right.