THE woman widely believed to be the nurse in the iconic image of two people kissing in Times Square to celebrate the end of World War II has died.
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Then a 21-year-old dental assistant, Friedman was grabbed and kissed by an elated sailor in New York’s Times Square on August 14, 1945 as news spread that Japan had surrendered and WWII would end.
Greta Zimmer Friedman’s son said his mother died Thursday at a hospital in Richmond, Va., of what he called complications from old age.
The photo was first published in Life, buried deep within the magazine’s pages.
Many people claimed to be the embracing couple caught in a clinch, but it was only in the 1980s that the true identity of Friedman and Mendosa became public. “It wasn’t my choice to be kissed”, Friedman said.
“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”, he said, but added that she thought Mendonsa to be “a lovely person”. “It was just somebody celebrating”.
On August 14, 1945, known as V-J Day, the day Japan surrendered to the United States, people spilled into the New York City streets celebrating the news. There also is a book about the photograph, named, “he Kissing Sailor: The Mystery Behind the Photo that Ended World War II”. It wasn’t a romantic event.
But according to Mr Friedman, his mother could recall the kiss in an instant.
Friedman had arrived in America only seven years earlier as a 14-year-old refugee from Nazi persecution in her native Austria.
Friedman will be laid to rest alongside her husband in Virginia’s Arlington National Cemetery.
Censorious critics ignored the vital context – that the incident had occurred on a day when history’s worst catastrophe came to an end and millions of young people, including Friedman and Mendonsa, discovered they would live rather than die.
Captured by sheer chance in a fleeting moment by photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt, the image has become one of the most famous images of the war.
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Other photos taken at the same time show in the background another smiling woman in a nurse’s uniform who was on a date with Mendonsa, and who subsequently became his wife.
