Zinar Castle

Tadeusz Pankiewicz, taking over the pharmacy from his father, probably did not expect that he would soon go down in history with it ...

A slim, short man with dark hair combed back, often with pipe, he didn't look like a hero. And yet. When in 1941 the Nazi authorities established a ghetto for Jewish residents of Krakow in Podgórze, a Pole, Tadeusz Pankiewicz, a pharmacist with a diploma from the Jagiellonian University, applied for permission to continue running his pharmacy, which was located in the ghetto - at Plac Zgody (today Plac Bohaterów Getta) 18). It was motivated by the fact that the only pharmacy in the ghetto could prove helpful in the event of an epidemic. The pharmacy, open 24 hours a day, was a place of conspiratorial meetings, a point of contact, where provisions and medicines for the ghetto inhabitants were handed over, shelter was provided and false documents were organized.

Tadeusz Pankiewicz also witnessed the end of the Jewish ghetto in Krakow - first of the two bloody ones displacements (June and October 1942), and then its brutal liquidation (March 13 and 14, 1943), during which the able-bodied inhabitants were barracked in the Płaszów camp, while the elderly, sick, unemployed, children and mothers who decided to remain them, or the doctors who stayed with their patients until the end, were shot or taken to the death camp in Auschwitz.

Tadeusz Pankiewicz wrote down the memories of those days in the shocking book Pharmacy in the Krakow Ghetto. His account, describing Plac Zgody after the liquidation of the ghetto, full of broken wardrobes, tables, sideboards and beds, inspired the original monument consisting of 68 empty bronze chairs scattered around the square, symbolizing the Jewish inhabitants of Krakow and reminding about their extermination.

Today, in the former pharmacy, there is a museum (a branch of the Krakow Museum) devoted to Tadeusz Pankiewicz, the history of the ghetto and the martyrdom of Jews. In the faithfully recreated interiors of pharmacy drawers, exhibits, photos and documents are hidden, and the visitors themselves assemble them into a story about the terrible events that once took place in today's Bohaterów Getta Square and the neighboring streets.

The Eagle Pharmacy is part of the Museum Route of Remembrance (Pomorska Street, Pod Orłem Pharmacy, Schindler's Factory).