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By Vivienne Walt

May 12, 1999 | STANKOVIC 1 REFUGEE CAMP, Macedonia -- It was one of those bone-chilling Balkan nights in late March when Xhavit and Fatimre Cecelia quickly gathered some clothing and food and shoved it into a bag. At the last minute, they grabbed a little album with photos of the kids and their house in Pristina, showing its velvet curtains and tiled kitchen.

Neighbors and friends gathered with similar bundles and began moving down the street in a convoy of tractors and cars, an attempt at shielding each other from Serbian police. They headed out of the city, south on the Macedonia road.

Within minutes, the two Cecelia boys, Agon, 6, and Ardin, 3, who were sitting on the back of a tractor, complained that they were cold. Without hesitating, Xhavit lifted them down, tucked them into the back seat of his friend's car and told the boys he would see them when they reached the Macedonia border.

When I meet Xhavit outside his new home -- Tent D-258 in this vast camp, which is home to 25,000 refugees -- he chokes on his words as he remembers that fateful moment more than one month ago. "They were cold. I just wanted to make them warm," he tells me, dropping his head in agony. He is a parent whose loving intentions might yet prove to be the most calamitous decision of his life.

Agon and Ardin have not been seen since the night the Cecelias left their home. No one knows where they went, although a possible scenario has developed from bits of stories Pristina's exiles have brought with them to the camp. In the chaos during the first few days of NATO bombing against Yugoslavia, tens of thousands of Albanians fled Kosovo in convoys that were blocked by Serbian militants. In the worst cases, some Albanians were executed. But many convoys simply disintegrated in the upheaval, with vehicles scattering in different directions.

Here in Macedonia, literally hundreds of people were lost during one disastrous night in those first few days of the NATO campaign. Macedonian special police, intensely jittery about the huge flood of ethnic Albanians swarming across their border, forced refugees out of the border transit camp at Blace, about 10 miles north of this refugee camp. They shoved refugees onto buses in a chaotic act that shunted immediate family members off to different camps, despite their pleas.

Among them were Jehona Aliu's mother and father and her three siblings. What doomed 5-year-old Jehona was the same quality that has made her a beloved fixture in Stankovic 1: her irrepressible, giggling energy. At the very moment Macedonian police were rounding up the refugees, Jehona had run off to play with other children in the transit camp. When she turned back, her family had vanished. She stood alone and bewildered in the middle of a crowded, unfamiliar mountainside camp.

For an entire day and night, Jehona wandered around the fenced-in transit camp, confused and terrified. Finally, a group of British NATO soldiers realized she was totally lost and took her back to their tent in this refugee camp to care for her. After five days, the soldiers met Xhavit and Fatimre Cecelia, who had begun their devastating search for their two sons. The British soldiers gently suggested that the couple look after Jehona. That was seven weeks ago. Now Tent D-258 has a corner crowded with dolls and a huge Daffy Duck, donated by aid workers and journalists who have come to know the curious hodge-podge family.

"I've come to love her," says Fatimre. "If she cannot find her parents, I would like to take her with me." The Cecelias are on a list to be evacuated to Norway, where Xhavit's sister lives, but have been unable to tear themselves away from Macedonia, for fear of never finding their children.

When I squat down to ask Jehona what happened the day she lost her parents, she runs off again. Watching her, Fatimre begins to cry silently. "Jehona speaks in her sleep every night," she tells me. "I hear her say: 'Where is my mommy? Where is my daddy?'" So far, there is no answer, although relief organizations suspect they might be elsewhere in Macedonia.

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