The famous photo titled “V-J Day in Times Square” was taken by renowned photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt shortly before the announcement of the end of the war on Japan.
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“It wasn’t that much of a kiss”, Friedman, who came forward as the woman in the photo years later, said in a 2005 interview with the Veterans History Project.
Joshua Friedman says his mother recalled it all happening in an instant. “It wasnt a romantic event”.
Friedman said that she did not see the photo until the 1960s, when she came upon a book of the Eisenstaedts images and found the moment immortalised on the page.
Mr Mendonsa, then 22, previously said he was so drunk he couldn’t remember the kiss.
While there have been many claims over the identity of the nurse in the photograph, author Lawrence Verria claimed to have proven that Friedman, along with sailor George Mendonsa, were the people in the iconic image taken in NY as crowds celebrated VJ Day. In 2012, the feminist blog Crates and Ribbons published an article criticizing the World War II photo for depicting and glorifying an image of sexual assault committed against Greta Friedman.
Greta Zimmer Friedman passed away from pneumonia, her son Joshua Friedman told the paper.
“The excitement of the war bein’ over, plus I had a few drinks”, Mendonsa 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. However, he said, “she didn’t assign any bad motives to George in that circumstance, that situation, that time”.
Friedman will be buried in Arlington National Cemetery, next to her late husband, Dr. Misha Friedman.
During the war, Ms Friedman fled Austria for the United States of America to escape the Holocaust.
Eisenstaedt did not document the people in the photograph.
“I found out later he was so happy that he didn’t have to go back to the Pacific where they had already been through the war”.
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“It wasn’t my choice to be kissed”, she added.
