Drs. Marcus & Carol Smith

DEDICATED DOCTORS

Honored October, 1985

Drs. Marcus & Carol Smith

April, 1945 Dr. Marcus Smith reached Dachau with a team of US army officers sent to reclaim the lives of the more than 32,000 prisoners. Memories of the concentration camp outside Munich haunted the good doctor all his life. "He tried to keep everything in," his wife Carol recalls, "but there were some times when he just couldn't." The disturbing memoir he published in 1972 Dachan: The Harrowing of Hell gives a glimpse of the kindly, practical physician, who set right to work on arrival, inventorying the camp kitchen.

Carol and Marcus Smith, she a pediatrician, he a radiologist, married in 1941 and came to live in Santa Fe in 1948. (He had been stationed here, at Bruns Army Hospital, during part of the war.) In 1951 Carol was stricken with polio while pregnant with their fourth child. Confined to a wheelchair for life, she continued to practice medicine and remained active in community affairs.