Mathilde (Tilly) Sugarman

Mathilde (Tilly) Sugarman (née Bueno de Mesquita) was born in Amsterdam, Holland on August 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.

When the war began, Tilly was 20 years old and living in Amsterdam. During the German occupation, restrictions for the Dutch Jews became increasingly tighter. Jews were forced to wear a yellow star on their clothing and carry cards identifying them as Jews. Tilly obtained a false identification card from a non-Jewish friend and lived under her friend’s name.

After a close friend living with Tilly’s family was taken away, the family split up and went into hiding. Then, Tilly worked as a nanny for multiple families. While living in hiding with a third family, Tilly was given a stolen blank identity card and could make her assumed identity more official. Protected with better papers, 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 ordinance corps, and immigrated to Canada shortly after.

Mathilde (Tilly) Sugarman died in 2006 and her full testimony is part of the Canadian Collection of Holocaust survivor testimonies. It is preserved in the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive and accessible through the Ekstein Library.

Mathilde (Tilly) Sugarman

It was such cruelty, such inhumanity… Is there a lesson? I don’t know.