The lost treaties of Lithuania: priceless diplomatic treasures found in Toronto

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It was a cool and rainy fall day, Canadian teacher Charles Hopkins says, when he inadvertently saved some of Lithuania’s most important diplomatic treasures from a Toronto landfill. It would be about 40 more years later, however, before the treaties made it back to their Baltic home.

In the early morning of 1980, Mr. Hopkins was running late at his home in west-end Toronto near High Park. His next-door neighbour, the widow of former Lithuanian diplomat Vytautas Gylys, who had fled the Soviet occupation, had recently died and her house was being cleaned and readied for sale.

Mr. Hopkins said he noticed boxes of bound documents piled up for trash collection at the curb of the Gylys house.

“Being an educator, and seeing books, I had to pick them up; I thought these looked really important,” said Mr. Hopkins, now 82, who today holds the UNESCO Chair in Reorienting Education toward Sustainability at York University.

He scooped up the leather-bound materials and took them home for safekeeping. “Some of them were in pretty rough shape – mouldy and so on, while others were in good condition.”

It wasn’t until 2021, however, that the mystery of these documents lifted.

It turns out that Mr. Hopkins had discovered many of the lost treaties of Lithuania: a flurry of early 20th-century diplomatic agreements that comprised the first modern-era recognition of Lithuania as a sovereign state after it declared independence in 1918.

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These were all signed in the 20-year period after Lithuania had slipped the yoke of more than 120 years of Imperial Russian rule and before it was occupied by the Soviet Union.

But misfortune kept them out of the public eye for more than 80 years – the equivalent of a lifetime – and for much of that period they were tucked away out of sight in Canada.

Darius Skusevicius, Lithuania’s ambassador to Canada, likens the discovery – which went on display in Vilnius, his country’s capital, in July – to finding the legendary Amber Room, the amber-and-gold-panels from St. Petersburg that went missing in the Second World War and were never found.

The seals and signatures on the recovered treaties are a who’s who of early 20th-century geopolitics.

Japanese Emperor Hirohito’s official stamp. Vladimir Lenin’s scrawl. The signatures of King George V, Pope Pius XI, U.S. presidents Calvin Coolidge and Franklin Roosevelt, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, among others.

Of the 105 treaties returned to Lithuania, 29 were included in the Vilnius exhibition.

These treaties are even more precious because of what happened after the world recognized Lithuania’s independence. After a brief interlude as a free country, it was once again seized by foreign powers during the Second World War, culminating in its forced annexation by the Soviet Union, a brutal occupation that would last until 1990.

The story of the lost treaties starts in 1939, when the storm clouds of war were gathering in Europe. In a short period, Lithuania would be invaded by the Soviets, and then the Germans, and then the Soviets again.

Mr. Gylys, a Lithuanian diplomat representing his country in Sweden, was secretly given the responsibility of safeguarding the treaties. He shipped them to Sweden, which maintained a policy of neutrality during the Second World War. In 1940, however, Sweden gave the Soviets access to the Lithuanian embassy after Moscow occupied Lithuania.

Mr. Gylys, who formed part of the Lithuanian government in exile after the country’s takeover by the Soviet Union, lived in Sweden until 1949. He then moved to Toronto with his wife, Vanda Gyliene, to serve as Lithuania’s consul general there. The Canadian government refused to recognize the Soviet’s annexation and diplomats such as Mr. Gylys continued their work in Canada. The couple bought a house on Toronto’s Grenadier Heights Avenue, a street where Mr. Hopkins would also later move in the 1970s.

Mr. Gylys died in 1959 and the Canadian-Lithuanian community tried to recoup the diplomatic papers now in the possession of his widow, Ms. Gyliene. That proved to be impossible as she sought a pension of the kind the U.S. State Department was according to the families of exiled Lithuanian diplomats who had settled in the United States.

An agreement was never reached and Ms. Gyliene died in 1979. Lithuanian community members searched the house, according to an official retelling prepared by the Lithuanian government, but never found the treaties.

It was the following year, in 1980, when Mr. Hopkins, next door, said he rescued them from a rainy downpour.

Some might consider it perplexing that Mr. Hopkins held on to the treaties for so long, instead of repatriating them as soon as he could. Lithuania, though, remained under Soviet occupation until 1990.

In 1981, Hr. Hopkins says he approached members of a Lithuanian community centre in Toronto, asking if the documents were important. But Mr. Hopkins said he found no takers. “They came and looked at them but found them of no importance or interest.”

He said he figured the Lithuanians would eventually contact him again if they were interested – but no one did. “I thought the Lithuanians weren’t interested in them.”

The years passed and the treaties and other documents, stored in his basement, “were just out of mind.”

He said in the lead up to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro he worked with a Russian diplomat, starting in 1989, who told him that one document – a map of the border between Lithuania and Russia – couldn’t be real because he could find no copy of it in Moscow.

Finally, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when restrictions forced Canadians to work from home, and curbed normal life, Mr. Hopkins and his wife, lawyer Katrin Kohl, began taking long walks in new neighbourhoods to pass the time.

A chance route on one of their COVID walks in early 2021 led them through a Lithuanian-Canadian cemetery in Mississauga and to the Lithuanian Museum-Archives of Canada, which brought to mind the stacks of documents still in their basement.

Ms. Kohl brought the treaties to the museum in April, 2021, and they were sent on to Lithuania – 82 years after they had been spirited out for safekeeping.

Among the most important documents retrieved is a 1920 treaty between Soviet Union and Lithuania that recognized the Baltic state as a sovereign country – an agreement the Soviets later broke.

In a recent public statement on the retrieval of this treaty, Lithuania’s Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said the document is a reminder of how Russia, which in 2022 launched a military assault to conquer Ukraine, cannot be trusted.

Mr. Landsbergis noted that in the peace treaty of Lithuania and Soviet Russia of July 12, 1920, “Russia acknowledged the unconditional independence of the Lithuanian state with all the ensuing judicial outcomes, and in which Russia, in good will, denied for all times any rights of sovereignty it had over the Lithuanian nation and its territories.”

Moscow violated this treaty in 1940 when it invaded Lithuania and again in 1944 when, under the banner of liberating the Baltic state, it occupied the country for more than 45 years.

“One cannot help but think that Russia indeed does not change: Having brutally broken its international legal obligations to Lithuania in 1940, in 2014 Russia broke its agreements with Ukraine, violating its territorial unity, and in 2022, launching war against this state, the most bitter in Europe since the times of World War II,” Mr. Landsbergis said.

In pro-independence rallies near the end of the Soviet occupation, Lithuanians would hold up signs with a date on them: 1920-VII-12 as a reproachful reminder of how the Communist regime had once signed a treaty recognizing their country as an independent state.