EDITOR'S NOTE: This story contains graphic descriptions and may not be appropriate for all audiences.
For the most part, Margherita Bertola Fray fondly remembers her childhood growing up in the northern Italian industrial city of Turin, or Torino en Italiano.
“Oh, it’s gorgeous! Torino is the most elegant city in Italy. At that time, I experienced the best time of [my] life,” said Bertola Fray while looking at pictures of her old home town in a photo scrapbook at her kitchen table in the Old Town section of Scottsdale.
But her idyllic childhood changed quickly in 1940 when Italian dictator Benito Mussolini joined Germany and declared war on Great Britain and France in 1940.
Not going along with Mussolini’s Fascists cost her father his job and got her involved as a messenger for the resistance movement, known as the Partisans.
“I used to go there and they gave me an envelope, sometime[s]. Sometimes they would give me a few pistols, I had to hide it in my purse and my bicycle and deliver it to the partisans. Everyone was so secretive, you know we couldn’t tell nobody anything," she said.
One day, she almost got caught by the Fascists on her bike route.
“They would have probably shot me, but the president of the school was standing right up at the top of the stairs and he said ‘hey hey what’s going on?” So they stopped and listened to him. He said 'she’s a great woman, a great girl and is a good student, please leave her alone,'” Bertola Fray remembered.
Does she ever think about what would have happened if they had taken her in, a fate many of her friends couldn’t avoid?
“They used to torture them, sexually abuse, then kill them, then hang them with a string under the balcony in the street. I have lost 95 girlfriends of mine who died like that. Sometimes like I’m ashamed that I survived, and that all of my friends are gone,” Bertola Fray admits. “You had the Germans trying to kill us, you had the fascists trying to kill us. We were in big trouble.”
It took her years to tell these horrifying stories, and she now knows she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
“[It took] so long. When I finally got married to an American soldier and I came to California and he used to have to call the doctor to come in to make me stop shaking, I used to have a panic attack,” she said.
After the war, Bertola Fray married and settled in Sausalito, raising four children. Her husband died in 1962, and she eventually retired to Arizona where she co-authored a book about her days in the Italian resistance.
Her one constant since childhood has been painting.
“Every Saturday all the kids go to [the] ‘March with Mussolini’ stuff. My job was to stay in the school and decorate the blackboard. I used to make mountains, trees and everything," she said.
And over nine decades, Bertola Fray has painted thousands of pieces. Many of her later works surround her in her Scottsdale home.
She says it helps to speak through her art.
“First of all, when I start, I clear my mind. I think about nothing else but painting, mixing the color, going into the process. It’s incredible. To me, it’s like I give birth to a baby when I make a painting," she said.
Bertola Fray isn’t sure why she survived all these years, but feels there may be a reason for her still being around at age 98.
“Well, I don’t know. It would have been easy if I had died early, but maybe it’s more fun staying alive and getting all the attention thinking I did something good in my life.”
But she says the nightmares of her childhood continue to haunt her, even these many years later.
“To tell you the truth, what I want to say to myself, I am ashamed to be a human. To think that a human can kill people. Now we have one person who can kill thousands, millions. How can they sleep at night?” she said.
Despite her sorrow, Bertola Fray stays active, refusing to leave her feet, continuing to paint despite bad eyesight and regularly speaking as a living history exhibit at local high schools as she hopes to pass along her story for the betterment of future generations.
