Between 1939 and 1945, approximately two third of European Jews were murdered. The exact number of victims is unknown. Estimates vary from 5 to 7 million; people usually speak of 6 million. By far, most of the victims were from Eastern Europe, especially from Poland, the occupied Baltic States (first occupied by the Soviet Union and later by Germany), and from the western part of the former Soviet Union (White Russia, western part of Ukraine). In the 1930s, this part of Europe was the centre of European Jewry. Approximately 3 million out of the 3.5 million Polish Jews were murdered (3 million non-Jewish Poles were also killed during the war). But also the Jewish communities in other areas occupied by nazi Germany, such as Western Europe (especially the Netherlands and France), Central Europe (Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania), and Southern Europe (Greece and former Yugoslavia), suffered greatly. Out of the 140,000 Jews who lived in the Netherlands in 1940, more than 100,000 did not survive the war. Not all the Jews were murdered in the gas chambers; many were murdered during mass executions or died from illness, hunger, exhaustion, or due to slave labour.