I am a Volunteer Tour Guide for The Wiener Holocaust Library and this is my first blog for the Library, about the Kraków Ghetto Pharmacy Museum. My recent journey to Kraków and from there to Auschwitz was a pilgrimage, a journey I had been intending to make for some time: my paternal grandparents and aunt were murdered in Auschwitz and I had long intended to visit the place of their deaths and retrace their final journey after their arrival there. I finally achieved my goal, with my brother, on the 76th anniversary of the day they had arrived and died in Auschwitz.
Introduction
I stayed in Kraków for a few days after our visit to Auschwitz as I wanted to visit ‘The Pharmacy under the Eagle’, to remind myself that as well as evil there is also goodness in the world. Whilst the world must never forget the appalling crimes committed during the Holocaust, it is right and uplifting sometimes to shine a light on the selfless actions and sheer goodness of bystanders who could have simply remained silent witnesses to some of the atrocious crimes that were committed during this dark period of history. Tadeus Pankiewicz was such a man. A Pole from Kraków, he ran a pharmacy in Podgorze, the part of the City where the Nazis decided to establish the Jewish Ghetto. He could have moved his business out and established it elsewhere: instead he bribed the German authorities who allowed him to stay and he then went on to save the lives of numerous Jews. As a result, he also witnessed and chronicled the otherwise unimaginable sufferings inflicted on the Jewish population of the Ghetto.
Tadeus Pankiewicz
Tadeus Pankiewicz’s pharmacy was situated at the apex of the Plac Zgody [English: Peace Square], later renamed Plac Bohaterow Getta [English: Ghetto Heroes Square]. The gate to the Ghetto stood at the entrance to the square, and from his shop window Pankiewicz was able to observe and record the scenes that went on in the square. Nazis used the space to carry out the ‘Aktionen’ [English: actions] of rounding up randomly-selected Jews, most of whom were immediately sent to extermination camps.
His pharmacy became a place of refuge for many of the inhabitants of the ghetto, where he provided them with advice and much-needed medicines, often free of charge. A number of people also managed to escape through the back entrance of the pharmacy. His actions were not without risk to himself: had he been caught he would have been shot immediately. Towards the end, he wondered whether he too would be killed, an inconvenient witness to the hell of the ghetto.
The Cracow Ghetto Pharmacy
In his memoir, The Cracow Ghetto Pharmacy, Pankiewitcz describes life in the ghetto as it becomes increasingly restricted and intolerable. He despairs at the sadism of the Nazis soldiers, recounting how they would often target elderly men and women, humiliating them and beating them up. His account of the massacre of the children during the liquidation of the ghetto is so shocking it is difficult to read the horror of the events he describes. The man in overall charge of the liquidation of the ghetto, and who enthusiastically took part in the murders of its inhabitants was Amon Goeth, whose name will be familiar to the many people who have read the book or seen the film about Oskar Schindler’s efforts to save ‘his’ Jews and whose factory was located in Kraków. Pankiewitcz is unsparing in writing about some of the Jewish men who were given positions of authority in the ghetto by the Nazis and used these positions to victimise their compatriots. In the end their efforts to ingratiate themselves with the occupiers came to nothing and they were all eventually murdered as well.
He also writes about some of the Nazis who despised the brutality of their colleagues and tried to help alleviate the suffering of the inhabitants of the ghetto. Special mention is made as well of the local factory and shop owners other than Schindler, who defied the Nazis and risked their lives to help their Jewish workers, supplementing their meagre food rations, making their conditions of work as comfortable as they could and even taking truckloads of food into the ghetto.
In a passage which underlines the importance of the work of The Wiener Holocaust Library and other such institutions, he recounts how in 1965 he met up with an old friend who had just read his memoirs, who refused to believe that they were a true account of the events, persisting in his view that they had to be greatly exaggerated, mostly fiction:
“Tadeus” he said, “I read your little book – I even liked it – but you must have exaggerated your description of the murders and mistreatment the Germans inflicted on the Jews…. you were carried away by your fantasy”. (Pankiewicz, 66).
Conclusion
After the war, several of the people he had saved testified to the heroic and selfless actions of the pharmacist of the ghetto and he was recognised by Yad Vashem as Righteous among the Nations on 10 February 1983. The Pharmacy is now a museum, as a branch of the Historical Museum of the City of Kraków, recreated to look as it did during Nazi occupation. Thirty-three memorial chairs made of bronze and iron are scattered in the otherwise empty Ghetto Heroes Square, a symbol of the terrible fate of the Kraków Jews.
Works cited:
Pankiewicz, Tadeusz. The Cracow Ghetto Pharmacy. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 1987.
Suggested further reading:
The Wiener Holocaust Library hold a number of books and documents relating to the ghetto in Krakow, some of which are listed below:
- Pharmacy in the Cracow’s Ghetto
- The Krakow Ghetto and the Plaszow Camp Remembered by George M Kren and Malvina Graf
For more related sources, try a search for any of the following keywords in our Collections Catalogue: Kraków (ghetto); Resistance
