Woman kissed by sailor in famous WWII photo dies

NEW YORK — The woman who was kissed by an ecstatic sailor in Times Square celebrating the end of World War II has died at the age of 92.

Greta Zimmer Friedman’s son said his mother died Thursday at a hospital in Richmond, Virginia. She died from complications of old age, including pneumonia, Joshua Friedman said.

Greta Friedman was a 21-year-old dental assistant in a nurse’s uniform on Aug. 14, 1945, known as V-J Day, the day the Japanese surrendered.

People spilled out into the streets from restaurants, bars and movie theaters in New York City when they heard the news.

That is when George Mendonsa, a Navy quartermaster, spotted Friedman, spun her around and planted a kiss on her. The two had never met.

“I did not see him approaching, and before I know it, I was in this vice grip,” Friedman told CBS News in 2012.

Mendonsa was on a date with a nurse, Rita Petry, who would later become his wife.

The photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt is called “V-J Day in Times Square” but is known to most the world over as simply, “The Kiss.”

Mendonsa said that in some photos of the scene, Petry can be seen smiling in the background.

The photo was first published in Life, buried deep within the magazine’s pages.

Over the years, the photo gained recognition, and several people claimed to be the kissing couple. In an August 1980 issue of Life, 11 men and three women said they were the subjects. It was years until Mendonsa and Friedman were confirmed to be the couple.

Joshua Friedman said his mother recalled it all happening in an instant.

“It wasn’t that much of a kiss,” Friedman said in an interview with the Veterans History Project in 2005. “It was just somebody celebrating. It wasn’t a romantic event.”

The photograph has become one of the most famous photographs of the 20th century.

The photographer recalled in his 1985 book “Eisenstaedt on Eisenstaedt” that a sailor in Times Square was kissing women randomly. When he saw a flash of white, he took four shots in 10 seconds.

“If she (Friedman) had been dressed in a dark dress I would never have taken the picture. If the sailor had worn a white uniform, the same,” he said.

Both of Friedman’s parents died in the Holocaust, according to Lawrence Verria, co-author of “The Kissing Sailor: The Mystery Behind the Photo that Ended World War II.”

Friedman, who had escaped Austria, got to the United States when she was 15.

She later designed dolls’ clothes, worked in summer theater and became a book restorer.

She moved to Frederick, Maryland, and graduated from Hood College in 1981, the same year her son and daughter graduated from university.

Friedman said of the photo, “It was a wonderful coincidence, a man in a sailor’s uniform and a woman in a white dress ... and a great photographer at the right time.”

Friedman will be buried in Arlington National Cemetery, next to her late husband, Dr. Misha Friedman.

ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS People visiting an exhibition in Moscow speak in April 2015 next to a famous photograph taken by German-American photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt of a sailor kissing a woman in New York’s Times Square on V-J Day. The woman in the photo, Greta Zimmer...