Three days in May stand out clearly in the local children's minds - days when the moaning and screaming from the Mahallae Muhaxhereve MUP interior ministry police station in Pristina became so unbearable that nearby families were forced to move to rooms at the back of their houses.
Even there, the victims in their purgatory could still be heard calling for God and their mothers. It may be that when the War Crimes Tribunal sits down to sift the evidence, the dates of May 18th to 21st will prove particularly significant.
The children saw the desperately overcrowded trucks arriving and the young female students being taken in. They saw the bonfires of documents burning around the station for up to five days before British Paratroopers took over. The evidence lies in piles of ashes inside the station, against its outside walls and in a cement enclosure across the road, the acrid smell of damp smoke still pervading the air.
Apparently they didn't find time to remove all their instruments of torture nor did they succeed in obliterating all traces of the unlucky souls forced to enter this place.
Not far from the front door, arrest photographs scattered on the floor include images of boys no older than 10. Further in, evidence that the MUPs had some kind of scalp-hunting competition was left in their lockers, many of which contained stacks of identity papers, from which the covers had been ripped and retained, each representing a "scalp".
In a land where identity is key, this is no petty crime. If there are any left who persist in the belief that the atrocities of Kosovo were committed by a small group of out-of-control paramilitaries, the evidence to the contrary is here, proof of a systematic plan to destroy these people's dignity along with their identity.
British military sources have talked to a witness who spent 40 days in this prison and who claims that four people died of beatings in his cell. People have attested that some 500 prisoners at a time were taken down the cold, stone steps and packed into the small, foul-smelling, barred basement rooms with their rough, plaster walls and concrete floors.
At the bottom of the stairs, their first chilling sight would have been an iron bed equipped with wrist straps and a mattress riddled with bullet holes. Behind the nearby door, rolls of bloodied cotton dressing lie close to the wall. A child's shoe lies in the middle of the floor beside a black bra and next to them, a long piece of a metal belt link used for heavy machine-guns.
There is an arsenal of weapons strewn casually around: knuckle dusters of every shape and size daubed with what may be dried blood; a vast collection of long, thick wooden staves and clubs, one inscribed with the a Serb pet name "I shut mouths."
There are flick-knives, butterfly knives, daggers, swords and a lethally spiked throwing star.
Pornographic magazines featuring whips and chains and males dressed as werewolves lie around the floor of the locker room. Religious icons alternating with girlie pin-ups adorn the walls. Hundreds of condoms litter a table top.
There is irony in the mountain of MUP uniforms, shirts and caps on the floor near the exit - evidence that at the last, they had tried to shed their own identity in an effort to escape retribution. The swaggering arrogance with which they greeted NATO troops soon turned to cringing pleas for a safety escort out of town. NATO officers fully expect to find other stations of equal depravity. Their very existence and the concept of what is acceptable behaviour towards fellow human beings, merely summons up images of other brutal regimes and other torture chambers.
That this particular MUP torture chamber was based in a place which, translated, means Neighbourhood of the Refugees, a name given to it 100 years ago when other desperate Albanians took refuge here, would suggest that history has taught us nothing.
As we left, a British officer came to say goodbye, holding the identity card of a young man found among several on the floor: "When you think of this, remember that Northern Ireland is not so bad after all," he said.