Residents of Lithuania’s capital receive letters sent 50 years ago

A letter written to a 12 year old girl in Lithuania it was delivered in December, nearly 51 years after it was sent by a pen pal in Poland.

“I thought someone was playing a trick on me,” said Genovefa Klonovska after receiving the letter, which included a colorful handmade rose and two paper dolls.

The letter, along with 17 others, fell from a ventilation shaft this summer, dirty and crumbling, when a wall was demolished in an old post office on the outskirts of Vilnius.

“The workers suggested that we throw away the old letters, but I called the post office,” said Jurgis Vilutis, the building’s owner. “I’m so glad they’re interested.”

The letters, from the late 1960s and early 1970s, were likely hidden by an unscrupulous postal worker after he searched them for cash or valuables, Vilutis said.

Lithuania it was part of the Soviet Union at the time, and the senders were emigrant relatives or pen pals from places like Australia, Poland, or Russia.

Street names and street numbers have changed in Vilnius, the country’s capital, and postal workers have spent months looking for the right homes and talking to current tenants and neighbors, tracking where recipients have moved.

Only five recipients were found. In several cases, children of deceased recipients received a lost letter.

“We feel a moral duty to do this,” said Deimante Zebrauskaite, head of the customer experience department at Lithuania Post.

“One lady compared the experience to receiving a message from a bottle thrown overboard. People got emotional. Some felt they saw part of their deceased parents’ daily lives,” Zebrauskaite said.

In the letter to Klonovska, sent from Koczary in Poland and postmarked in 1970, a girl named Ewa complains that buses no longer reach her village, so she has to walk in the -23ºC cold, and asks for pictures of actors.

Now 60, Klonovska doesn’t remember Ewa. She likely wrote to Ewa after finding her address posted to pen pals in a newspaper, and the relationship ended after the letter was not delivered.

“So good that the letter was inconsequential. Her loss had no impact,” Klonovska said. “What if they delivered a lost letter from a love suitor, and their wedding never took place?”

See images of the end of the Soviet Union