Iconic kiss wasn’t her choice, but she was OK with it

Second of two parts:

The sailor in the famous end-of-war Times Square “kiss” photograph, George Mendonsa, died Sunday at 95.

The next day, someone painted “#METOO,” the social media hashtag for the movement against sexual harassment and assault, on a statue commemorating the kiss in Sarasota, Fla.

The woman in the photo, whose married name was Greta Zimmer Friedman, said the kiss wasn’t consensual.

“It wasn’t my choice to be kissed,” she said in a 2005 interview for the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project. “The guy just came over and kissed or grabbed.”

In 2016, her son, Joshua Friedman, told The New York Times after his mother’s death that, while she understood the contention that it was an unwanted sexual advance, she did not view it that way. In the 2005 interview, Zimmer said, “It was just somebody really celebrating. But it wasn’t a romantic event. It was just an event of ‘thank God the war is over’ kind of thing.”

Three months earlier, Mendonsa had been at the helm of the USS The Sullivans during the Battle of Okinawa and dragged survivors and the dead from the water.

Alfred Eisenstaedt took the “kiss” photo for Life but didn’t get the subjects’ names. Zimmer didn’t see the picture until the 1960s. She recognized her hairdo, tapestry purse and perfectly straight stocking seams. Mendonsa saw it in 1980 when Life reprinted it in hopes of identifying the pair. The editors invited them to Times Square.

Smiling in the photo background is Rita Petry, 20, Mendonsa’s date. They married in 1946, and Petry joked years later that her husband had never kissed her like that.

Zimmer, an artist and mother of two, remembered that day as happy, the kiss only a part of it.

“It was a day that everyone celebrated because everyone had somebody in the war, and they were coming home,” she said in 2005. “So it was a wonderful gift finally to end this war.”