Greta Zimmer Friedman, whose iconic kiss was seen around the world in a LIFE photograph taken on V-J Day in NY has died at the age of 92.
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Greta Zimmer Friedman, then a 21-year-old dental assistant, was kissed by a sailor on August 14, 1945, during a celebration as news of the Japanese surrender reached home.
Friedman was a 21-year-old dental assistant in a nurse’s uniform on August 14, 1945, known as V-J Day, the day the Japanese surrendered. George Mendonsa, who in 2015 confirmed he was the man in the photo, saw Friedman for the firs time, spun her around and kissed her.
Eisenstaedt’s photo, “V-J Day in Times Square”, ran the following week in Life magazine.
The photo captured an instant in time which has become iconic, symbolizing an important event affecting many subsequent generations.
Friedman will be laid to rest alongside her husband in Virginia’s Arlington National Cemetery. It was first published in Life, buried deep within the magazine’s pages. Friedman, who was not acquainted with Mendonsa at the time of the kiss, has described the kiss in unromantic terms.
Greta Zimmer Friedman passed away from pneumonia, her son Joshua Friedman said. (The kiss didn’t dampen the young couple’s enthusiasm for one another; Mendonsa and Petry married and remain a couple in Rhode Island to this day.) A U.S. Navy photojournalist, Lt. Victor Jorgensen, caught the same picture from a different angle. In fact, Mendonsa was on a date at the time with nurse Rita Petry, who would later become his wife.
Friedman said in an interview archived with Veterans History Project: “Suddenly, I was grabbed by a sailor”.
The woman whose participation in an impromptu kiss celebrating the end of the war with Japan has died on Thursday after a brief illness at the age of 92. “It was just somebody celebrating”.
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Several couples came forward, and their competing claims have only been considered settled since 2012, when historian Lawrence Verria claimed to have proved the people in the photo were Ms Friedman and Mr Mendonsa in his book The Kissing Sailor: The Mystery Behind the Photo that Ended World War II. It wasnt a romantic event..
