Immediately following the liberation of Lvov from German occupation by the Red Army in 1945, the Soviet government began restoring the buildings laid waste during WWII, using some tombstones from the ancient Jewish cemetery which was destroyed in 1940 by bombing.
The Soviets used tombstones for sidewalks and streets. In 1947, they even used them to build the city's central marketplace. The heads of the Jewish community have duly protested this travesty for many years and now, finally, the municipality has announced that it will remove those stones used for construction and will return them to the cemetery, the only Jewish burial place which survived Nazi bombing.
The community heads claim that hundreds of tombstones are still embedded in the sidewalks and the public buildings of Lvov to this very day.
