“Friedman was a 21-year-old dental assistant in a nurse’s uniform” when sailor George Mendonza planted a kiss on her on August 14, 1945 – the day Japan surrendered to the United States to end WWII.
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The photo became one of the most reproduced images of the VJ Day celebrations in the world.
“I’m not sure about the kiss… it was just somebody celebrating”, Friedman recalled in that interview. “It wasn’t a romantic event”.
The photo, called V-J Day in Times Square, was taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt. Several people even came forward claiming that they were the couple seen kissing in the picture.
In 1956, she married a doctor, Mischa Friedman, and moved to Maryland, where she raised a son Joshua and a daughter Mara.
“The photo means a lot to so many people”, “My mother always felt like it wasn’t anything she did, it was something that happened to her”.
On 14 August 1945 the then 21-year-old was working as a dental assistant when she wandered into Times Square after hearing of Japan’s surrender, following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that over 150,000 Japanese civilians.
Her son Joshua Friedman told CNN she died of pneumonia at an assisted living home in Richmond, Virginia. Greta Zimmer Friedman, the nurse that had that iconic smooch, has died at 92. It was years until Mendonsa and Friedman were confirmed to be the couple.
Friedman’s claim is perhaps the most convincing, however, since it is backed up by the Naval Institute Press’s 2012 book The Kissing Sailor: The Mystery Behind the Photo That Ended World War II.
“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”. She had arrived with her sisters to the U.S. at the age of 15.
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Friedman is set to be “buried in Arlington National Cemetery, next to her late husband, Dr. Misha Friedman”. “If she (Friedman) had been dressed in a dark dress I would never have taken the picture”.
