Margherita Bertola Fray, a Scottsdale resident and one of the last members of the Italian resistance during World War II, has died at age 99.
Fray grew up in Turin, Italy, during the rise of Benito Mussolini’s fascist government. She served as a messenger for the Italian Partisan resistance movement.
“I used to go there and they gave me an envelope. 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," Fray recalled in an interview with KJZZ in 2024.
She described how she risked her life while seeing other contemporaries lose theirs.
"We had the Germans trying to kill us. We had the fascists trying to kill us. We were in big trouble. They used to torture them, sexually abuse, then kill them, then hang them with a string under the balcony in the street,” Fray said.
After the war, Fray married an American soldier and moved to California before retiring in Arizona.
An avid artist, she also painted thousands of pieces, saying it helped to clear her mind of trauma.
“To tell you the truth, what I want to say to myself, I am ashamed to be a human," Fray said. "To think that a human can kill people. Now we have one person who can kill thousands, millions. How can they sleep at night?”
Fray died Friday in hospice care in Scottsdale. She would have been 100 in June.
