Woman claimed to be the nurse kissed by a sailor in iconic photo at end of WWII
Greta Friedman, who said she was grabbed and kissed by a sailor in a euphoric moment that made for one of the most defining American photos of the 20th century, died Thursday. She was 92.
Friedman died of pneumonia, her son, Joshua, said.
The black-and-white image of a woman and a U.S. sailor was shot by the renowned photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt on Aug. 14, 1945, after the news of Japan’s surrender effectively heralded the end of World War II. The photograph ran as a full page in Life magazine shortly after.
Yet the identity of its subjects — a dark-suited sailor and a woman in a white nurse’s outfit captured in what seemed to be mid-embrace amid a celebration in Times Square on V-J Day — has long been debated. At least 11 men have claimed to have been the sailor in the photo, while three women, including Friedman, had prominent claims that they were the nurse.
Friedman said she did not see the photo until the 1960s, when she came upon a book of Eisenstaedt’s images and found the moment immortalized on the page. She wrote to Life and was told that another person had been identified as the woman in the photo.
“I didn’t believe that because I knew it happened to me,” she said in 2005 in an interview archived by the Veterans History Project. “It’s exactly my figure, and what I wore, and my hairdo especially.”
The photo has served as a symbol of the exuberance Americans felt at the end of World War II, capturing what many saw as a charmingly ideal portrait of the United States at a portentous moment of history. It has been the subject of countless reproductions, re-enactments and tributes.
Friedman was born Greta Zimmer on June 5, 1924, in Wiener Neustadt, a small town in Austria outside Vienna. She was one of four daughters born to Max Zimmer, a clothing store owner, and Ida Zimmer.
As conditions worsened for Jews in Nazi-occupied Austria, her parents sent their children out of the country. Friedman and two of her sisters came to the United States in 1939, while the other sister went to what was then Palestine.
Her parents died in the Holocaust.