A greater generation fades away

On Aug. 14, 1945, Edith Shain kissed a boy.

He was a sailor, and the war was over. He pulled her aside and kissed her, and she closed her eyes. Photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt captured the moment for LIFE Magazine, creating one of the most iconic images of the 20th century.

On June 20, Shain passed away. She wasn’t always the nurse in white, at least not for most of her life.

In the commotion of V-J Day celebrations, Eisenstaedt didn’t get the names of either of his subjects, and for years there was debate about the identities of the two celebrators in the famous photo.

That lasted until Shain came forward in 1979.

When Eisenstaedt met her, he said he looked at her legs and knew she was the girl.
Shain spent most her life out of the spotlight. She was a nurse, a teacher, a mother and a wife. She was never a celebrity — except when she was called upon to don a white dress and commemorate V-J Day in 2005. She said she was embarrassed by the photo, but not the kiss.

“Someone grabbed me and kissed me, and I let him because he fought for his country,” Shain said. In 2008, she said the photo “says so many things — hope, love, peace and tomorrow. The end of the war was a wonderful experience, and that photo represents all those feelings.”

Eisenstaedt has met several men claiming to be the sailor, and Shain even dated one of them, but she was never certain any of them were the man who kissed her on that joyous day.

With Shain’s passing, we are forced to acknowledge that the Greatest Generation will soon be gone. It’s been 66 years since D-Day, and while those Normandy beaches are marked with the gravestones of the Allies who gave their lives there, we are losing the flesh-and-blood connection we had with one of the greatest stories in American history.

As the children of the Baby Boomers, we are in a unique position. Our children will grow up in a world with almost no living members of the Greatest Generation. We will have to tell our children about our grandparents and all the things they struggled with.
I imagine those stories will seem like ancient history.

In recent years, we’ve immortalized the men and women who fought World War II in films and video games. Games like Medal of Honor and Call of Duty, films like Saving Private Ryan and miniseries like Band of Brothers — and more recently, the film Inglourious Basterds and HBO’s The Pacific — have built a modern narrative, perhaps our narrative, about that bloody conflict.

It was the just war fought by average Americans against an evil and cruel enemy. It was a better time, and perhaps they were better people.

I don’t think I’m alone in saying I know more about World War II from those films and video games than I ever learned from own grandfather. He died when I was seven. He had Alzheimer’s, and it was hard for me at my young age to reconcile the old man I knew with the young soldier my mother told me about.

Now that I’m 20, close to the age he was when he served, I get it.

He wasn’t a hero, at least not in the Hollywood sense. They were young men, they were typical and they loved America. And when they came home, America loved them.

As a nation, we celebrated. All the pain, hatred and loss washed away with a kiss in a sea of people. It doesn’t matter who the couple was or what their story was, because on that day, it was everybody’s story.

For each member of the Greatest Generation who passes on, we are losing our connection with that story.

Someday, it will all just be history.