A half mile away, his daughter, Burbuqe Dylatahu, 32, was also shaken by the NATO attack. From her second-floor window, she watched as a dozen Serb policemen wearing camouflage uniforms and black masks poured from two armored personnel carriers and three tanks and turned their flamethrowers on the abandoned headquarters of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Hours later, Serb policemen kicked in her front door. “Leave your house now or we’ll kill you,” they shouted. Dylatahu, her husband, three daughters and a dozen neighbors fled through a basement exit. Outside, she says, many houses were on fire; the charred bodies of 10 male neighbors lay strewn about in several courtyards. As she hurried past the carnage, dragging a suitcase, a Serb soldier ripped off her gold necklace. That night, after fleeing to the nearby village of Rac, she learned her husband’s barbershop had been destroyed in a fire set by the Serbs; the flames had swept through Djakovica’s commercial quarter. The Brahushi family would soon join hundreds of thousands of Kosovars on a forced exodus into Albania. Their odyssey is a vivid example of the massive human tragedy unfolding in the Balkans as Milosevic’s rampage through Kosovo shatters the lives of more than 600,000 refugees.

Fadil Brahushi would not be driven out of Kosovo easily. With his wife, adult son, two grandchildren and two dozen other family members, he hunkered down in his basement for the next 10 days, subsisting on bread and salt, waiting for the storm to pass. The Serbs cut off phones and electricity in Djakovica; in the blackness, Brahushi could hear NATO warplanes pounding military installations night after night. The group was terrified to step outdoors. One day a friend ventured down the street to buy jam and flour, and returned covered in blood and bruises after a beating by Serb police.

Finally, on the morning of April 3, Brahushi knew he had to flee. The Serbs had closed in on the block, rousing the Kosovars from their homes. “Go to Albania,” they jeered. “That is your country.” As Serb policemen stood guard, Brahushi shepherded 65 people from his house and from adjoining homes into his brother-in-law’s Mercedes cattle truck. The vehicle joined a convoy of tractors, cars and trucks and snaked along a rough mountain road toward Albania, 20 miles to the south. Nearing the border, Brahushi gathered passports and driver’s licenses and hid them inside the blankets of a 10-day-old baby. When Serb police demanded their documents at a checkpoint, Brahushi lied: “The authorities seized them outside Djakovica.” The Serbs stripped the truck’s license plates, then waved them through. Crossing the frontier early last week at Morini, Brahushi and the others cast a final glance at their homeland. He began to weep. “We felt like we were already dead,” he said.

Their temporary graveyard was the Albanian border town of Kukes. Brahushi and his clan staked out a spot in a muddy field beside a mosque, on the sloping shore of a manmade lake. The tractors and wooden carts of less prosperous refugees surrounded them. Each member of Brahushi’s group had managed to bring out a single suitcase with a few days’ worth of clothing; they had a few hundred dollars among them. The conditions at the makeshift camp were appalling, but Brahushi was reluctant to move very far from the border. “All we want,” Brahushi said, “is to go back home to Kosovo.”

He had never imagined that his world could crumble so completely. An industrial town of 80,000 people set in a picturesque mountain valley, Djakovica had been home to his family for generations. Since retiring from his small textile business three years ago, Brahushi had spent his days cultivating vegetables in his garden and brewing fiery Kosovar spirits known as raki. But political tensions were increasing in Djakovica as the Serb government tightened its grip on the province. Portraits of Milosevic went up all over town. Brahushi’s street, Seventh Brigade Street, named after Tito’s partisans, was renamed Bojan Popovitch Street, in honor of a Serb war hero. After the Kosovo Liberation Army stepped up attacks on the Serb Army last year, Serb authorities cracked down, arresting and beating many of the town’s young men, including Brahushi’s nephew, Leonard Lleshi, 23. Then came the NATO bombings and the accelerated policy of ethnic cleansing.

In the camp, the refugees quickly fell into a numbing routine. Each morning, they brewed tea on kerosene stoves and ate bread distributed by the Albanian Army, flavored with dabs of strawberry jam. Then they washed their clothes in the lake, stepping gingerly along a shore befouled byhuman waste. At midday Brahushi trekked to Kukes’s public telephone office to call distant relatives in Tirana, Albania’s dilapidated capital, standing in line for hours among a mob of fellow refugees. Leonard Lleshi roamed the crowded streets, hunting futilely for news of his wife, who had become separated from him in the confusion of the mass exodus. Brahushi was luckier: he stumbled across his daughter, Bubuque, while walking through town on his first day in Kukes. As night fell, an icy wind whipped through the camp. Women and children huddled inside the truck, which had been covered with canvas and insulated with rugs and blankets. The men lay beside a campfire at night, drinking raki for warmth before falling asleep.

By the third day in Kukes, the refugees were restless. The bitter evening chill and poor food had weakened the children. Young men feared being press-ganged by the uniformed KLA operatives who lurked on the edges of the camps. “I have thought about joining the KLA,” admitted Lleshi. “But now I don’t want to be killed.” A glimmer of hope appeared that afternoon: a cousin of Brahushi’s arrived from Tirana with the news that he had found an apartment for the entire family. But there was a problem: more than 20,000 refugees had already flocked to Tirana, and police had begun diverting new arrivals from the overcrowded city. The Brahushis would have to park their truck in another town, then sneak into Tirana by taxis and cars. “But how can we guarantee that the truck won’t be stolen?” asked Brahushi’s brother-in-law, the owner and driver. The family would stay put in Kukes for another night.

Thursday dawned cold and drizzly. Brahushi was now determined to escape from the miserable encampment. Somebody had found a private van that would lead the way and check out conditions in Tirana. The cattle truck would follow and park in a space that had been secured outside the capital. All afternoon the men huddled in a semicircle, arguing about their plans. “We know nothing about Tirana,” said one of Brahushi’s cousins, an elderly man with thick glasses. “We don’t have any money. We should stay here.” Brahushi sipped from a precious bottle of ouzo he had rescued from his house in Djakovica. “Conditions are bad here, and the children are freezing,” he countered. The truck owner fretted about the winding mountain road and how the rough ride would affect two infants on board.

As evening approached, the clan agreed to set out for Tirana. Eight young men would travel in the van, and the rest would ride in the Mercedes truck. “Who can say when we’ll return home?” Brahushi said. Then he smiled grimly, climbed into the rig and rode off into the night, bound, like hundreds of thousands of his countrymen, on an uncertain journey.