Greta Friedman, the woman kissed by a sailor in the iconic picture taken in Times Square on V-J Day in 1945, has died, according to her son Joshua Friedman.
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It is one of the best-known pictures of 20th-century America: a kiss in Times Square to celebrate the Japanese surrender and the end of World War 2.
The woman who played a starring role in one of the most famous photos of the 20th century has died.
Her husband, Dr. Misha Friedman, is buried at Arlington and she will be buried next to him.
Friedman had been ill for some time and had recently contracted pneumonia, her son told the New York Daily News. That’s when she was kissed by George Mendonsa celebrating Japan’s surrender. The photograph doesn’t show the faces clearly, and Eisenstaedt didn’t get caption information before publishing.
“The excitement of the war bein’ over, plus I had a few drinks”, Mendonsa said.
The fact that Friedman didn’t consent to the kiss before it happened has caused some to criticize it as an act of sexual assault. It was years until Mendonsa and Friedman were confirmed to be the couple.
“It wasn’t that much of a kiss”, Friedman said in an interview with the Veterans History Project in 2005.
Joshua Friedman says his mother recalled it all happening in an instant.
‘My mom always had an appreciation for a feminist viewpoint, and understood the premise that you don’t have a right to be intimate with a stranger on the street, ‘ Josh Friedman told the NYDN. “(But) she didn’t assign any bad motives to George in that circumstance, that situation, that time”.
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Mendonsa is 93, and lives in Rhodes Island. He died in 1998. Greta Zimmer Friedman is survived by her two children; grandchildren Caroline Friedman of Glen Allen, Va., and Michael Friedman of San Francisco, Calif., plus numerous nieces, nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews.
