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Without her mother's quick thinking and survival skills, Georgette Chinitz may not have survived the Holocaust.

Chinitz was born a refugee in Toulouse, France, in 1941, one year after her parents fled Belgium for the south of France, the safest place for Jews at the time. When it became too dangerous to stay in Toulouse, her family fled to Bruguiere, a village no bigger than one square mile, where Catherine Laborderie and her nephew, Pierre Boue, hid Chinitz (nee Baran), her parents, and some immediate relatives in a stable until 1943.

"The township set us up with single women who had some properties and met with our family," Chinitz said.

Chinitz and her family returned to France in March, more than 60 years after the Holocaust ended, to posthumously honor Laborderie and Boue with Yad Vashem's Righteous Gentile award.

"Being survivors, we wanted to honor the family who saved us," Chinitz said. Chinitz's cousin, Jack Bajowicz, finalized all the paperwork and the date of the ceremony, March 2, with Yad Vashem. Once the date was finalized, Chinitz and her sister Sylvie traveled to France to meet Bajowicz and his wife.

"In order to bestow these honors posthumously, you have to go through Yad Vashem," Chinitz said. "You don't just say, 'they were righteous; here's a medal.' The Jewish community in Toulouse and the township of Bruguiere were involved. It's a very involved process."

When Chinitz and her family visited the stable that hid them for two years, she said that the outside looked exactly the same, down to the same wooden shutters. The only difference was that the stable was now an official house. The owners were not receptive to Chinitz.

"The people there wanted nothing to do with us," Chinitz said. "They closed the shutters. They were afraid maybe that we would take over the house, who knows? We had absolutely no claim to the house. It wasn't ours to begin with."

The visit to the stable was followed by a visit to the Terrebasse Cemetery, where Bajowicz's grandmother was buried in 1943. To Chinitz's delight, Laborderie had not only saved her family, but ensured that Bajowicz's grandmother had a proper Jewish burial as well.

"It was so emotional," Chinitz said. "I was supposed to film the whole ceremony, but I couldn't. I was shaking like a leaf."

After visiting the cemetery, Chinitz arrived in Bruguiere for the official Yad Vashem ceremony.

"All the officials were really involved and notified by our families and Yad Vashem," Chinitz said. "The mayor of the town was there, the priest who was in charge of the whole region's religious institutions was there. There were representatives from the Israeli embassy, Yad Vashem, and the head of the Jewish community of Toulouse was there."

To Chinitz's surprise, the entire town was notified, and many from young to old came out to attend the ceremony. The ceremony also included veterans holding French flags, making the ceremony "extremely official -- to honor one of theirs."

"When we arrived and finally gathered in the square, what we saw was really unbelievable," Chinitz said.

At the foot of the town square's centerpiece, a statue dedicated to those from Bruguiere who fell in all the wars, Bajowicz laid a plaque dedicated to those of the family who did not survive the Holocaust, including his mother and Chinitz's uncles.

"General Petain was a collaborator and the Jews were supposed to be deported," Chinitz said. "The French were only too happy to comply to it. A lot of people were deported this way… the reason they did not deport my mother is because I was under 2 years of ago and they could not find my father. They couldn't get Jack because he stayed with the Jewish boy scouts, and somebody told him that his mother was being arrested, and he should not come home."

The plaque listed the names of all the Jews who were deported from Bruguiere and perished in the Holocaust.

"This statue now has a Jewish inscription," Chinitz said.

After the ceremony, Chinitz and her family visited Laborderie's gravesite to place a plaque from Yad Vashem, which would tell passersby for years to come of her achievements.

"We were so emotional that we did not even ask when she died," Chinitz said.

The ceremony was followed by a series of speeches at Bruguiere's town hall. It was at town hall that Boue's daughter, Odielle, came to accept the Righteous Gentile awards on behalf of her father and great-aunt.

"The daughter of Pierre Boue, who is very timid about it, finally came to the ceremony," Chinitz said. "Odielle knew the whole story. We were so happy to see her and thank her. She told the stories from what her father told her."

The surprise of the day, however, was a visit from three Jewish boy scouts from Toulouse, who came to visit Bajowicz -- in the same uniform he wore throughout the war, the uniform that saved him from deportation so many years ago.

"Jack's solace was going and meeting other Jewish scouts [who attended the ceremony]," Chinitz said. "While he was talking, three young men came from the Scouts to greet him from Toulouse, who wore the same uniforms as what he wore during the war."

Although the procession in Bruguiere honored two people credited with saving Chinitz and her family, their journey was far from over. In the beginning of 1943, Chinitz, her father, and her expecting mother fled Bruguiere when the roundup and deportation of older Jews began in the area.

"One day, we had to meet on the square, and my mother said, 'I'm not going to the square. I'm going the other way'," Chinitz said. "So, my mother was expecting my sister, I was 2 years old, and we fled. We walked miles and miles. Finally a bus picked us up and took us to Niece."

Chinitz and her parents fled from town to town in France and fled into the Piermont Mountains whenever a deportation was scheduled. Eventually, they ended up with a priest in Italy for nine months, who took them under his wing. There, too, the family lived in a stable.

"People came together to bring us food every day," Chinitz said. "There was always milk for the babies."

Once things went rocky in Italy, a guide crossed the border into Switzerland and lived in a refugee house in Davos until the end of the war. In all, the Baran family fled for four and a half years from Nazi persecution.

"Little by little, our lives got back together," Chinitz said. "We went to shul, we made Shabbos every Shabbos, we had yom tov. My mother continued because it was something they held on to -- religion and love of Yiddishkeit, no matter what. This is what held them together -- hope."