Ghetto Heroes Square and Eagle Pharmacy

Ghetto Heroes Square (plac Bohaterow Getta) is in the Podgorze district of Krakow, Poland, on the south bank of the Vistula. Before the war it was called Plac Zgody, or Concord Square. In March 1941 the German occupiers created the Krakow Ghetto in Podgorze and forced the city's Jewish population, together with Jews from the surrounding area, into a small walled area. Thousands of people were crowded into the district, and the square became the central point for roll calls, selections and deportations. Most of the ghetto's inhabitants were sent to the Belzec extermination camp or to the nearby Plaszow camp, and the ghetto was liquidated in March 1943. The square is now a memorial space. In 2005 the Krakow architects Piotr Lewicki and Kazimierz Latak unveiled a installation of 70 oversized empty bronze chairs, representing the household objects left behind by the deported people and the absence of the victims. The chairs stand in rows across the open square, and some are located nearby on the pavement. On the square's edge, at plac Bohaterow Getta 18, is the Eagle Pharmacy (Apteka Pod Orlem). Its owner, Tadeusz Pankiewicz, was a Polish Catholic pharmacist and the only non-Jew permitted to operate within the ghetto. He supplied medicine, sedatives and hair dye free or at reduced cost, hid documents and acted as a point of contact for the residents, and he was honoured by Yad Vashem in 1983 as Righteous Among the Nations. The pharmacy was converted into a museum branch of the Historical Museum of Krakow in 2003. The exhibition is thematic and uses original fittings, drawers, medicine bottles and documents, alongside photographs and testimonies describing life in the ghetto. Visitors can see the restored shelves and interior of the pharmacy as it looked during the war. The building has been restored and kept close to its original character. Together with Schindler's Factory and the remaining fragment of the ghetto wall on ul. Lwowska, the square is an essential stop on a visit to Holocaust history in Krakow.