By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
Thanks to the popularity of the 1993 movie
Schindler’s List,
as well as the success of the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow,
many people
assume that the Kazimierz neighbourhood, where most of the
city’s Jews lived
prior to the Holocaust, served as the Jewish ghetto during the
war.
Elsewhere in Poland, a Jewish district
typically became that
city’s Jewish ghetto. But this was not the case in Krakow.
The Nazis considered Krakow a German city, as
it had been
ruled from Vienna prior to 1918, and made it their headquarters
in occupied
Poland.
They considered Kazimierz “too close” to the
city’s ccnter
to be inhabited by Jews. Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of
occupied Poland,
wanted to make the city “Judenrein.” So the Nazis forced the
Jews across the
Vistula River to Podgorze.
Overcrowding was an obvious problem, with one
apartment
allocated for every four families. Windows facing “Aryan”
Podgorze were bricked
or boarded up to prevent contact with the outside world. Four
guarded entrance
gates accessed the ghetto.
While Oskar Schindler succeeded in saving
some 1,200 Jews,
he was not the only person in Krakow who refused to take part in
the savagery
of the “Final Solution.”
It turns out there was one “hole” through
which food,
information, and medicines could be brought in, and information
sent out, in
the otherwise hermetically-sealed ghetto.
In 2005, the Plac Zgody square in Podgorze
was renamed Plac
Bohaterow Getta (Ghetto Heroes Square) to commemorate the memory
of the
inhabitants and victims of the ghetto.
The square has 64 empty chairs scattered
about, representing
the 64,000 Krakow Jews murdered by the Nazis.
It also houses the Apteka pod Orlem (Under
the Eagle Pharmacy)
which is now a museum documenting the life-saving activities of
the pharmacy’s
owner, Tadeusz Pankiewicz, during the war. This was the one
non-Jewish business
left inside the ghetto.
Despite a few books written about him,
Pankiewicz remains
relatively unknown, even after having been designated by Israel
in 1983 a “Righteous
Among the Nations,” a term that describes non-Jews who risked
their lives
during the Holocaust to save Jews from extermination.
Born in 1908 in Sambor, Poland, he went to
university in
Krakow and took over the pharmacy in 1933 that his father had
founded in 1910.
Before the Second World War, both Jewish and non-Jewish patients
used it.
In March 1941, when the Nazis established the
ghetto, the
pharmacy by chance found itself enclosed there. Thanks to
Pankiewicz’s
endeavours, the Nazis allowed it to continue to operate.
Three other prewar pharmacies owned by
non-Jews in the area
relocated to the non-Jewish side of the city.
Pankiewicz and his associates, Irena
Drozdzikowska, Helena
Krywaniuk, and Aurelia Danek-Czort, all Catholics, provided aid
and support to
the ghetto’s inhabitants.
They risked their lives to undertake numerous
clandestine
operations, smuggling food and information, and offering shelter
on the
premises for Jews facing deportation to the camps.
The pharmacy helped people maintain contact
with the outside
world, and it enabled Polish doctors to visit the pharmacy,
providing medical
attention.
Under the Eagle kept residents alive by
distributing
tranquilizers to help keep hidden children quiet during Gestapo
raids. As well,
the pharmacy provided medical care and hair dye to help disguise
escapees.
It also became a hiding place for Jews and a
clearing house
for information about possible escape routes.
The museum re-creates the interior as it
looked in the
1940s, based on photographs from the period. The space features
replicas of
furniture and pharmaceutical supplies.
Visitors can see the prescription room, where
“recipes for
survival” were dispensed to Jews trying to cope with the trying
circumstances
of their existence.
The duty room includes Pankiewicz’s own
eyewitness accounts
of day-to-day life in the ghetto, which were preserved and later
published.
Films feature scenes from the ghetto
deportations of May,
June, and October 1942 to the Belzec death camp, and the
ghetto’s final bloody
liquidation in March 1943, with the remaining Jews sent either
to Auschwitz or
the new Plaszow concentration camp in Podgorze itself.
Following the war, the new Communist
government nationalized
the Under the Eagle Pharmacy, and it eventually was turned into
a bar.
But in post-Communist Poland, the
indifference to the
Holocaust has been reversed, and since 2003 the pharmacy has
become a branch of
the Historical Museum of the City of Krakow.
After the war, Pankiewicz returned to work as
a pharmacist;
he died in 1993. No one should leave Krakow without paying
homage to this
remarkable man.
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