Between Russia and Germany

The New York Review of Books has an article Holocaust: the ignored reality. It asks for attention for the area between Germany and Russia that suffered most in the war. For example:
- Two thirds of the Jews who would be killed during the war were already dead by the end of 1942. The main victims, the Polish and Soviet Jews, had been killed by bullets fired over death pits or by carbon monoxide from internal combustion engines pumped into gas chambers at Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor in occupied Poland.
- Most of the victims in the Soviet Union were not Russians but people from those people in between, like the Belarussians and the Ukrainians. The Germans never occupied more than a very small part of Russia.

These areas were so contested because both Germany and Russia saw them as sources of minerals and food. It was their way of having colonies.

There same countries are now again "in-between". When there are elections in Germany and France we read about Social-Democrats and Conservatives. When it comes to Ukraine or Moldova it is at one about pro-EU and anti-EU parties. It is a pitty that our politicians find it so hard to see those countries are really independent and not as something we need to control.