The Nurse: The Life of Greta Zimmer Friedman
The woman in white was not, in fact, a nurse. Her name was Greta Zimmer Friedman, and she was a 21-year-old dental assistant. Her story, like George’s, was shaped by the immense upheaval of World War II, but from a tragically different perspective. She was born in 1924 in a small town near Vienna, Austria. As Jewish children, Greta and her two sisters faced mortal danger with the rise of the Nazi regime. In 1939, as war loomed, her parents made the heart-wrenching decision to send their children away to safety. Greta and her sisters were sent to the United States as refugees; their parents remained behind, later perishing in the Holocaust.
Arriving in America, Friedman found herself an orphan in a new land. She learned English, pursued her education, and eventually began working in a dentist’s office on Lexington Avenue in New York City. Her uniform—a crisp white dress and cap—was standard for dental hygienists and assistants of the era, leading to the decades-long assumption that she was a nurse. This mistaken identity added to the photo’s symbolic power, as nurses represented healing, compassion, and the tireless effort to save lives during the war.
On August 14, 1945, Friedman was on her lunch break. She had heard rumors all morning that the war was ending, and she walked over to Times Square to see the news ticker. The electronic sign confirmed the unbelievable: “V-J DAY… V-J DAY… WAR IS OVER.” Standing in the crowd, a profound sense of relief washed over her. For her, the end of the war was not just an abstract victory for her adopted country; it was a deeply personal moment. It was the final, definitive end of the monstrous regime that had murdered her parents and torn her family apart.
As she stood there, lost in thought, a stranger in a dark sailor’s uniform suddenly grabbed her. Before she could process what was happening, he had dipped her backward and was kissing her. The moment was a confusing, overwhelming blur. “It wasn’t my choice to be kissed,” she would later state in an interview. “The guy just came over and grabbed! That man was very strong. I wasn’t kissing him. He was kissing me.” For her, the moment was not one of romance but of surprise and shock, a fleeting instant where her personal experience was subsumed by a stranger’s overwhelming joy.
