By the tens of thousands -- in an operation that required extensive advance logistical preparations -- they were herded into the city's railroad station overnight. At dawn some were packed aboard trains -- one refugee said he was among 28 people in a compartment meant for eight -- bound for Macedonia. Others were loaded on buses and even a refrigerator truck that normally transports sides of beef and dumped near the Albanian border to leave the country on foot.

''I walked out into the garden, and there were three people with black masks and big guns,'' said Suzana Krusniqi, collapsing in tears as she crossed the Albanian border with her elderly parents the next day.

''In every house they broke the doors,'' she said, speaking in English. When we went out, everyone was in the street walking between men with black masks and big guns.''

The forced exodus of Pristina gathered momentum in April. When the Serbs marched Ramadan Osmani and his family from their home to the railroad station in early April, he said, it was so crowded they had to wait 12 hours for a train to Macedonia, where they slept in a field for six days before finding a space at the Bojane refugee camp.

Some ethnic Albanians tried to stay in Pristina. Many lived a cat-and-mouse existence after eluding the first wave of Serbian looting and expulsions, hiding in other people's homes or fleeing to nearby villages. Fearing discovery, they left always by back doors, made little noise, lit candles only in rooms where heavy blankets covered the windows, and sent old people out to buy food.

Hafiz Berisha and his family evaded being expelled from Pristina for two months, hiding in five homes. But last Sunday, the 70-year-old retired policeman was standing in line to buy bread when Serbian policemen walked up and pulled his cousin and a neighbor, both men under 30, out of the line and hustled them away. Mr. Berisha said he had seen two people gunned down in front of him and 40 bodies in a mass grave, but the sight of the helpless men being led away was too much. ''You can't even buy bread,'' he said.

He fled the next day.

Luljeta Jarina, 19, and her father, Ramiz, who had worked in the personnel department of a mining company, were among those who went into hiding. Once when she ventured into the garden behind her home out of boredom, a Serbian sniper shot at her, she recalled. And each night, Serbian soldiers and policemen cruised the streets of the city, firing their Kalashnikovs wildly into the air. Just this Wednesday, the Serbs rounded up 18 men, including her father, at gunpoint. All but her father and two others were taken away, to an unknown fate, she said.