A NURSE who symbolised the end of the World War II when she was pictured in a smouldering clinch with a sailor in New York has died aged 92.
Greta Friedman unwittingly became the centrepiece of one of the most famous pictures of the 20th century during a break from her job as a dental assistant in 1945.
She was walking on Times Square the moment Americans learned of the Japanese surrender on 14 August, 1945.
Photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt snapped a sailor in a dark uniform kissing Ms Friedman with his arms around her as revellers in New celebrated the victory over Japan, or V-J Day.
Her son, Joshua Friedman, said she died on Thursday in Virginia after suffering a series of ailments, including pneumonia, NBC News reported.
She will be laid to rest with her late husband, Mischa Elliot Friedman, at Arlington national cemetery in Virginia.
After the embrace, Friedman and the sailor, quartermaster George Mendonsa of Rhode Island, went their separate ways. Eisenstaedt’s photo, “V-J Day in Times Square”, ran the following week in Life magazine.
Mr Mendonsa and Ms Friedman were not identified until 1980 when Life asked the unknown pair to come forward. Mendonsa told CBS he and his future wife had been celebrating the end of the war when he began kissing women in the street.
Mr Mendonsa said of the image: “The excitement of the war being over, plus I had a few drinks, so when I saw the nurse I grabbed her, and I kissed her,” he told CBS News in 2012, when the channel reunited the pair in Times Square.
“I did not see him approaching, and before I know it I was in this vice grip,” Friedman recalled.
And she added: “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.”
Photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt later said: “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.
The female subject of the famous photograph has been disputed. Edith Shain, who died in 2010, also claimed she was the nurse in white.
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