Monika Diana Sears, who died on December 5th, made a unique contribution to Holocaust education in Ireland. She was born in Łódź, Poland in 1939; her father, Pawel Rozenfeld, was murdered the same year. A Jewish child, she survived the horror of Nazi occupation, including incarceration in the Warsaw Ghetto, due to a combination of luck and the steely determination of her mother, Edyta.
Monika remained silent about her early childhood until 1990 when she returned to Poland for the first time since the war with her youngest son, Oliver. In 1991, she wrote a memoir, From My War to Your Peace, Love Nonna, framed as a letter to her Italian grandson.
Her legacy featured prominently in The Objects of Love, an exhibition produced by Holocaust Awareness Ireland and the OPW and shown at Dublin Castle in 2022. Visited by 35,000 people, it transferred to the 92NY in New York in 2023.
In 1947, Monika and her mother arrived in London, where Edyta married a Polish dentist, Jakub Wandstein, who had lost his entire family in the Holocaust. The three rebuilt their lives in London, after a fashion. In 1960, Monika married Ronald Sears, the London-born son of a Polish immigrant, and settled into motherhood.
This domesticity was disrupted when the young couple were recruited by MI5. Monika, a refugee and beneficiary of postwar British generosity, was encouraged to repay the favour. Her parents owned an apartment rented to the Russian embassy. Their mission was to befriend the tenants to assess any appetite for defection.
In 1970, Ronald was asked to befriend Oleg Lyalin, a KGB agent. When Lyalin defected in 1971, 105 Soviet officials were expelled, the largest such action taken by the British against the USSR. Shortly afterwards, Monika left the service, explaining she was a young mother of three and had done her duty.
In the early 1970s, Monika cofounded an antiquarian book business, M&R Glendale, with Ruth Sands, mother of human rights lawyer and author Philippe Sands’ which ran for 25 years. In 2011, Monika wrote Don’t Forget to Lock It Away in collaboration with Ruth, recounting their life as intrepid book dealers. They remained lifelong friends.
In the 1980s, Monika frequented Ireland, where her second husband, Eric Cook, lived in Kinsale. Eric died in 1989, but her connection endured, as Oliver moved to Ireland in 1986.
In 2018, Monika and Oliver appeared on RTÉ’s Miriam Meets, presented by Miriam O’Callaghan, following an address at Trinity College Dublin, the only occasions when they spoke together publicly about intergenerational Holocaust trauma.
Fiercely independent and intellectual, Monika spoke five languages and had a lifelong passion for literature. Her courage was unrelenting. In 2022, aged 82, she and her husband, Carlos Jobbe Duval, were carjacked at gunpoint in Santiago but fought off their attackers, escaping unharmed.
In October 2025, The Objects of Love launched at the Museum of Independence Traditions in Radogoszcz, outside Łódź – a former Gestapo detention centre where her father had been imprisoned. The exhibition brought Monika full circle: for the first time, relief from survivor guilt, but also, the fear of rising anti-Semitism.
Monika’s understanding of survival, moral clarity and commitment to human rights motivates Holocaust Awareness Ireland, founded in 2021 by Oliver and her daughter-in-law Catherine Punch. Monika is survived by her husband, Carlos, and three sons, Paul, Ian and Oliver.