Eagle Pharmacy
Trail of War
The only pharmacy inside the Kraków Ghetto. It was run by Tadeusz Pankiewicz, the only Pole living within the ghetto from its creation to its end. The pharmacy also served as a place of help and contact for the ghetto's Jewish residents. Today it is a museum.
History
The pharmacy was founded in 1909 by Józef Pankiewicz, and from 1930 his son Tadeusz, a pharmacy graduate of the Jagiellonian University, worked there. When the Germans set up the ghetto in Podgórze, the building on the former Small Market Square found itself right at its centre. Tadeusz Pankiewicz obtained permission to keep running the pharmacy and was the only Pole to live in the ghetto from the beginning to the end of its existence. The pharmacy was open round the clock, and in the evenings doctors, scholars and artists from the ghetto met there, including the songwriter Mordechai Gebirtig and the painter Abraham Neuman. After the post office in the ghetto was closed in December 1941, the pharmacy staff began carrying letters and valuables and smuggling food and medicines. Today the former premises house a museum, opened in 1983.
Did you know?
While the ghetto existed, the mathematician Tadeusz Ważewski, a professor at the Jagiellonian University, and the philosopher and lawyer Dr Rappaport met twice in the pharmacy. They discussed angle trisection, one of the great problems of Greek mathematics.