Knowledge without frontiers Knowledge Without Frontiers | Page 40

Piskernik’s prescription glasses from the 1960s.
Archives of the Republic of Slovenia. Photo: Nebojša Tejić, STA.
Piskernik’s concentration camp identification number.
Archives of the Republic of Slovenia.
"Put a pot on your head
and hold your tongue"
As an independent and erudite woman,
"What did you make
today?"
During the Second World War Piskernik was
interned in the Ravensbrück concentration
camp. The half-starved internees’ favourite pas-
time was to talk about food, and they would
greet each other in the morning with “What
ments about her last name (which in Slovenian
is a derivative of the word for a cooking pot) at
the time of the independence referendum in
Carinthia, an issue for which she actively cam-
paigned. The newspapers, for example, pub-
lished the warning that she should “put a pot
on her head and hold her tongue.”
However, she also liked to indulge in self-dep-
did you make today?” Piskernik diligently wrote recation. When she bought a light blue Zastava
an unusual and idiosyncratic cookbook, which pots of the time, she supposedly said she had
down her fellow internees’ recipes, thus creating
has been preserved to this day as a unique man-
uscript.
40
Piskernik had to swallow many stinging com-
750, a car the same colour as the typical enamel
been assigned the colour precisely because it
was “pot blue”.