Apteka Pod Orłem, Kraków

Apteka Pod Orłem, the Eagle Pharmacy, is now a museum at 18 Bohaterów Getta Square in Podgórze. It began life as a private chemist’s shop in 1910, then became an extraordinary refuge during the German occupation. When the Nazis enclosed Kraków’s Jewish population in a ghetto here in March 1941, this was the sole pharmacy within its boundary.

Tadeusz Pankiewicz, who had managed it since 1933, became the only non-Jewish Polish business owner allowed to remain there. The name above the doorway mattered: while public lettering in the ghetto had to be changed into Hebrew, the Polish words “Pod Orłem” were allowed to remain. Behind that familiar sign, Pankiewicz and his staff passed messages, smuggled food, held valuables for deported people, and supplied medicines.

Hair dye helped people appear less likely to be deported; sedatives quieted children concealed from raids. During the ghetto’s destruction, the pharmacy’s recesses sheltered Jewish people. The pharmacy ceased trading in 1967. An exhibition arrived later, and a permanent museum opened in 2003, enlarged with support from Roman Polanski, who had himself been imprisoned in the Kraków Ghetto.