The Portuguese Kingdom accepted Jews fleeing from Spain after the 1492 expulsion but the attitude towards them quickly changed and it had serious consequences for the Jewish population.
Listen to the clip of Mathilde Sugarman’s testimony recalling her family’s history, then read her biography.
Mathilde (Tilly) Sugarman (née Bueno de Mesquita) was born in Amsterdam, Holland on August 16, 1917. She had two brothers and her family belonged to a Portuguese Sephardic congregation. She finished a secular high school and went to university for two years to study Dutch and Psychology. During the German occupation of Holland, Tilly obtained a false identification card from a non-Jewish friend and lived under her friend’s name. Tilly began working with the Dutch Resistance. She helped translate, copy, and distribute news gleaned from foreign news reports and worked as a courier. Tilly was still in Amsterdam when the Canadians liberated that city in May of 1945. After the war, she found her mother and brother to be alive but discovered that her other brother perished in Dachau. In January of 1946, she married her husband, a Canadian soldier in the ordnance corps, and immigrated to Canada shortly after. Mathilde (Tilly) Sugarman died in 2006. Her testimony was recorded in 1996, Toronto, Canada.