An account, from an attachment perspective, of a child's escape from Poland in 1939 to New York by way of Romania, Hungary, and the last boat out of Genoa. She was enrolled in a progressive US kindergarten boarding school ‘to learn to play’ when she was already reading and spoke four languages. Through the use of poems the author describes a painful and destructive attachment history for both herself and her younger brother: an important document of the effects of immigration and broken attachments on the development of children and parental relationships.