Ghetto Heroes Square & The Eagle Pharmacy

Why is it significant?

Stand among the seventy oversized cast-iron chairs spaced across the stone pavement of Ghetto Heroes Square, formerly known as Plac Zgody. Between 1941 and 1943, this wide square was the central assembly point, roll-call ground, and brutal deportation platform of the Krakow Ghetto.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand among the seventy oversized cast-iron chairs spaced across the stone pavement of Ghetto Heroes Square, formerly known as Plac Zgody. Between 1941 and 1943, this wide square was the central assembly point, roll-call ground, and brutal deportation platform of the Krakow Ghetto. The haunting memorial, created by Krakow architects Piotr Lewicki and Kazimierz Łatak in 2005, evokes the furniture, luggage, and personal belongings cast into the square during the ghetto's violent clearance. When the inhabitants were marched away to the gas chambers, this cobblestone space was buried beneath discarded beds, coats, and medicine bottles.

The final liquidation of the Krakow Ghetto occurred on 13 and 14 March 1943, directed personally by SS commandant Amon Göth. Approximately two thousand human beings — the elderly, the sick in the hospital wards, newborn babies, and children from the orphanage — were gunned down directly on this square. Six thousand able-bodied workers were driven on foot into the nearby barracks of KL Plaszow, while the remaining thousands were forced into cattle cars bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau. The centuries-old Jewish community of Krakow was reduced to ashes.

Look at the corner building at number 18: this is the celebrated Eagle Pharmacy, Apteka Pod Orłem. Its Polish owner, pharmacist Tadeusz Pankiewicz, was the only non-Jewish citizen permitted by the German authorities to live and operate a business inside the ghetto. Pankiewicz and his three courageous staff members — Irena Droździkowska, Helena Krywaniuk, and Aurelia Danek — turned the pharmacy into an oasis of rescue, medical aid, and underground communication. They dispensed free medicines, sheltered fugitives in secret closets, smuggled hair dye for disguises, and distributed forged Aryan papers to save lives.

In 1983, the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem honored Tadeusz Pankiewicz with the medal of Righteous Among the Nations. His harrowing wartime memoir, The Krakow Ghetto Pharmacy, stands as one of the world's most vivid and indispensable eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust. Today, the preserved pharmacy rooms operate as an emotionally devastating branch of the Museum of Krakow, with historic apothecary drawers and personal testimonies. Pankiewicz proved that even in the epicenter of absolute evil, a solitary person can preserve the honor of humanity.

Exit the square by following Kącik Street eastward toward the railway underpass. You are walking the exact route that forced-labor columns marched each morning into the industrial factory district of Zabłocie.