Eagle Pharmacy


The Eagle Pharmacy Museum is located on the southwest edge of the Bohaterów Getta Square, under number 18 in Kraków, Poland.
Since 1910, its proprietor was Jozef Pankiewicz and after him Tadeusz Pankiewicz, his son who ran it since 1933. Before World War II, it was one of the four pharmacies in Podgórze district. Its clients were both Polish and Jewish residents of the district. A frequent customer was, e.g., "Bikkur Cholim" charity.
On March 1941, the Germans established a ghetto in Podgórze for Kraków's Jews, Pankiewicz's pharmacy was the only one within its borders and its proprietor was the only Pole with rights to stay in it.
The Jews that lived in the ghetto chose the pharmacy as the place for conspiratorial meetings. Among them were: writer Mordechai Gebirtig, painter Abraham Neumann, Dr Julian Aleksandrowicz, neurologist Dr Bernhard Bornstein, Dr Leon Steinberg and pharmacists: Emanuel Herman, Roman Imerglück.
Soon it also became a source of various resources and medicaments, which helped in avoiding deportation: hair dyes used for rejuvenating the appearance, luminal used to calm children while hidden, smuggled in luggage beyond ghetto.
During the bloody displacement at the Plac Zgody in 1942, Pharmacy personnel issued free medicines and dressings while its recesses areas were used as shelters for saving Jews from deportation to extermination camps.
Pankiewicz and his assistants Irena Drozdzikowska, Aurelia Danek and Helena Krywaniuk were liaisons between Jews in the ghetto and beyond it, passing the information and smuggling food. They also were depositaries of valuables entrusted to them by deported Jews in the last moments before leaving the ghetto.