In a heartwarming moment that was captured on camera, a woman on an eight-hour flight from Israel to Brussels helped calm a crying boy.
Rochel Groner was on the July 14th flight with her husband when a boy started crying. She told InsideEdition.com it was clear to her that the shrieking boy was trying to communicate something but he didn't have use of a vocabulary, and his wailing was causing other passengers to get weary.
"People are frustrated. People are waking up. It was a day flight, which is always a little harder," Groner said. "The phones [on the plane] just started to ring so I'm getting thoughts in my mind we're going to have an emergency landing. You can see people kind of craning their necks and trying to figure out what's going on and all I'm thinking about is this poor mom; she's probably mortified as it is."
As the boys crying continued, Groner decided to lend a hand.
"Finally, I just got out of my seat," she said. "I went to the aisle where he was sitting. I just put out my hand. It was surreal. I didn't know what I was doing. There are tears streaming down his face. He put out his hand. I just put him on my lap and just gave him a gentle but firm hug and started to rock him and he was quiet."
Groner sat with the boy, who she said she thinks was around 8 years old, and doodled on motion sickness bags with him. He started to smile.
“I took another motion sickness bag and I put my hand down and I gave him the pen and together we traced my hand,” she said. “He started to smile and he looked at me and took his glasses off and put them on his face. All of a sudden, we were friends.”
As she sat with the boy, Groner said she could feel the sense of relief from passengers on the plane.
“It told me that everybody just wants a hug and to be listened to and if we’re willing to do that, we can literally change lives […] I was just in awe,” said her husband, Bentzion Groner, who took pictures of the touching moment.
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