Two different genocides: One during World War II, one that began in the 1980s.

An MSU student found common links between the two.

Jasmine Angelini-Knoll, a political science and anthropology junior, compared memoirs written by boys of the Holocaust and the "Lost Boys" of Sudan.

The "Lost Boys" refer to children who were displaced, orphaned or both during Sudan's 21-year civil war that officially ended in 2005.

"These groups of memoirs similarly engage you in imagining what it would be like to be in that situation as a child," Angelini-Knoll said. "And to sort of make you exercise empathy and, hopefully, that would inspire you to ask further questions about the broader context of the experiences."

Reading the memoirs

Her inspiration for the research came when she began to work with Ken Waltzer, who directs MSU's Jewish Studies department, through MSU's Undergraduate Research Initiative. Waltzer is in the process of writing a book on the rescue of children and youth in the Buchenwald concentration camp during the Holocaust.

Angelini-Knoll, who has taken five and a half years of French, read and translated French memoirs written by men who had experienced Buchenwald as children.

"It was interesting because there were 900 kids when the Allies came through in April of 1945," she said. "I know quite a bit about the Holocaust, but didn't know there were so many kids there."

One day, Angelini-Knoll was reading a memoir by a Sudanese boy for leisure when she noticed something.

"I looked at a lot of similarities in experiences," Angelini-Knoll said. "Also, in the way that the stories get told, the way they are set up, the way they start and move to the end and what kinds of things get left out."

She said the memoirs describe what the boys' lives were like before the genocides happened.

They are trying to figure out the meaning of their experiences, what it meant that they survived and what they are doing with the rest of their lives, Angelini-Knoll said.

"Boys were being displaced, oppressed, made into slaves, forced to endure terrible and horrifying experiences," Waltzer said. "What (Angelini-Knoll) is doing is helping highlight what is going on today by comparing it with the memoirs of boys who underwent these sort of experiences during the Holocaust."

Contrasting contexts

But there are differences, too.

"Being a prisoner in a concentration camp is really different from being a refugee," Angelini-Knoll said.

The physical challenges of survival, starvation and extreme working conditions may be the same in the broader sense, but the contexts are very different, she said.

One of the differences between the two kinds of memoirs is although the boys experienced each genocide around the same age, they wrote their memoirs at different stages in their lives, Angelini-Knoll said.

"She knows she is comparing different things and different experiences," Waltzer said. "She's very good at seeing the differences and yet she sees also some of the commonalties and ways in which these commonalties of terrifying, horrific experiences violate cherished notions of what childhood should be."

Looking ahead

Angelini-Knoll was one of two undergraduate students who presented research April 13 to the MSU Board of Trustees.

"I'm impressed that she did this research on the Holocaust and the Lost Boys," said Trustee Faylene Owen, who is MSU's first Jewish trustee. "They are such horrible travesties that words cannot describe."

Ian Gray, MSU's vice president for research and graduate studies, said students "can develop self-sufficiency, engage in independent inquiry and self-confidence" by doing this kind of research at the undergraduate level.

Angelini-Knoll said she hopes her research will encourage people to, if not become more active, then aware.

"Hopefully once they do that, it will inspire more questions about why this is happening and what they can do about it," Angelini-Knoll said.

She wants to continue researching the subject and maybe publish her work.

"If we are going to say never again to the Holocaust, we should be saying never again to genocide everywhere," Angelini-Knoll said.