A letter written to a 12-year old girl in Lithuania was delivered in December, almost 51 years after it was sent.
Now in her 60s, Genovefa Klonovska said after being handed the letter, "I thought that someone was pranking me. " The letter included a handmade, colored rose and two paper dolls. It was sent to Klonovska by a young girl in Poland. They exchanged letters in what is known as a pen pal program-when people write letters to each other without actually meeting.
The letter, together with 17 others, was discovered this past summer when a wall was taken down in a former post office in Vilnius.
The letters, from the late 1960s and early 1970s, were likely hidden by a postal worker after he searched them for money or valuables, Vilutis said. The senders were family members or pen pals from places such as Australia, Poland, or Russia. Street names and their numbering have changed in Vilnius, capital of Lithuania. Post office workers spent months looking for the people who were supposed to receive the letters—the recipients. Only five recipients were found. In several cases, children of dead recipients were handed a lost letter.
Deimante Zebrauskaite, head of Lithuania Post, said "We felt a moral duty to do this. "
Zelrauskaite added, "One lady compared the experience to receiving a message from a bottle thrown into sea. People were emotional（动情的）. Some people felt they saw a part of daily life of their dead parents. "
In the letter to Klonovska, sent from Koczary in Poland, a girl named Ewa complains buses no longer reach her village. Now in her 60s, Klonovska has no memory of Ewa. She probably wrote Ewa after finding her address in an advertisement for pen-pals in a newspaper. Their relationship stopped after the letter was not delivered. "The loss was not life-changing, "said Klonovska. She then asked, "What if they delivered a lost letter from a suitor（求婚者）to his love, and their wedding never happened?"
