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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Ms Friedman was a 21-year-old dental assistant when she was grabbed and kissed by George Mendosa in New York’s Times Square on 14 August 1945.
In a report on Friedman’s death, The New York Times said Saturday, the picture took on “darker undertones” in later years as an instance of sexual assault, based on how Friedman described it: “I felt that he was very strong. It wasnt a romantic event”.
Greta Zimmer Friedman passed away from pneumonia, her son Joshua Friedman told the paper.
The famous photo, “V-J Day in Times Square”, ran the following week in Life magazine. Just then, George Mendonsa, who was on a date with an actual nurse named Rita Petry, had spotted Friedman.
Eisenstaedt did not document the people in the photograph.
The woman dramatically kissed by a sailor celebrating the end of the second world war in an iconic photograph seen around the world has died.
In a 2005 interview with the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project, the Austrian-born Friedman said she later designed dolls’ clothes, worked in summer theatre and became a book restorer.
During the war, Ms Friedman fled Austria for the United States of America to escape the Holocaust. The photograph first appeared in a 1945 issue of Life with the caption “In New York’s Times Square a white-clad girl clutches her purse and skirt as an uninhibited sailor plants his lips squarely on hers”. One of them, whose claim was bolstered by a book-length investigation, was Greta Friedman, an Austrian refugee of the Holocaust who had settled in NY.
Friedman will be buried in Arlington National Cemetery, next to her husband.
“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 years before Mr Mendonsa and Ms Friedman were confirmed to be the couple.
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Friedman didn’t know of it until the 1960s, when she saw it in a book of Eisenstaedt’s pictures.
