The restoration efforts at the cemetery involved an enormous amount of physical work due to the destruction that occurred in the last days of war in the clashes between the Soviet and the German armies and uncontrolled vandalism by Poles in the years after the end of WWII. By the 1980s when Tadeusz Wlodarczak started repairing the cemetery, the knowledge and skill of stonemasonry was a dying art in Poland. The historical preservation of the cemetery therefore required training in original techniques of stone carving and masonry. Tadeusz mastered the craft and trained hisdisciples, returning material artefacts of German/Jewish Breslau back to the memory of Polish Wroclaw. The physical preservation of the Jewish Cemetery was guided by an effort to explore and preserve for the future the silenced pasts of the city to counter the homogeneity inherent to the 'pamiec narodu' or ‘national memory’, a heritage policy formulated by the Polish Communist regime, which in effect, censored historiography and publications on the German heritage of the Recovered Territories (Thum 2011). In addition to the physical preservation work, Tadeusz Wlodarczak and his team of amateur preservation activists carried out a deeply innovative project in public education. By opening up the cemetery to visitors and knowledge sharing activities, they created a space in the city’s landscape, which raised questions about the city’s past and disrupted the official state historical narrative. Thanks to their preservation efforts at the Old Jewish Cemetery, Wroclaw’s Jewish heritage continues to speak to contemporary Polish residents and international visitors about the actual historical cultural pluralism of the city’s past, at the time of rising nationalism and anti-Holocaust backlash. The heritage preservation work of Tadeusz Wlodarczak tied to the Old Jewish Cemetery in Wroclaw has made possible alternative conceptions of history, memory and identity. Tadeusz transformed his political opposition work of the Solidarity era into a restoration project that saved one of the few remaining relics of the Jewish-German past of Wroclaw for posterity. For him, saving this past was a way of creating an urban space for critical civic inquiry and exchange at a time when public deliberations were restrained by communist censorship and ideology. Thus, his initiative is a project of resilience tied to both the tangible and intangible heritage of the city, and which contributes to the pluralistic democratic imaginary tied to historical memory.