"East side story": on being an epidemiologist in the former USSR: an interview with Marcus Klingberg.

Marcus Klingberg was born on 7 October 1918, in Warsaw, Poland, into a Hasidic, rabbinical family. After the Nazi invasion of Poland, he escaped to the USSR where he trained and worked as an epidemiologist from 1939 to 1945. For 35 years after the war, he continued his professional work in Israel. The harsh conditions within the Soviet Union during World War II provided a challenging setting for epidemiologic work-a setting that has remained largely hidden from Western view. In this interview, Klingberg describes his work as an epidemiologist in the USSR and his subsequent encounter with Western epidemiology.