The apothecary of the Kraków Ghetto

In March 1941, the German occupier sealed off a ghetto in the Podgórze district, on the right bank of the Vistula, in Kraków. The decree of Governor Otto Wächter, dated 3 March 1941, herded the city's Jews into it; around 20 March the district was closed off. Between 15,000 and 20,000 people were crammed into a space that had housed around 3,000 residents. In April, a wall enclosed the ghetto, its panels rounded into the shape of funerary tombstones. The gates were guarded by the German police, the Polish Blue Police, and, inside, the Jewish police.

On the central square, Plac Zgody, stood the Apteka pod Orłem, the Pharmacy Under the Eagle, founded in 1910 and taken over in 1933 by Tadeusz Pankiewicz, a Catholic. When the ghetto encompassed the square, he obtained permission to stay: the only non-Jew authorized to run a business within the walls. Supplied from outside, his pharmacy was one of the few points of contact between the closed ghetto and the Aryan city; three Polish employees came and went as he did.

Typhus, tuberculosis, and malnutrition ravaged an overcrowded population. Pankiewicz had to decide on the function of his pharmacy: an ordinary business under German control, a transfer beyond the walls, or a clandestine base of support. The slightest illegal act, in a ghetto patrolled by the Gestapo, could lead to the firing squad.