It may be one of the few buildings left intact in the total devastation of Shtimjle, but behind its walls lies a vision of hell unique even to Kosovo.
Four days ago, this hospital housing 350 seriously brain-damaged people was simply abandoned by its Serb directors and nursing staff. They loaded vast stores into three cars and a bus, took the keys of the hospital pharmacy and food stores and left Kosovo's most vulnerable souls - men, women and children ranging from five years old to 100 - without food, water or medicines.
The electricity disappeared with the directors. The doctors who once attended these patients had long since abandoned them. Their Hippocratic oath ran out three months ago, when they condemned their charges to an existence without the vital drugs needed to calm their torment, their aggression, their destructiveness, their tendency to injure others and, above all, the terrible impulse to injure themselves.
Yesterday, when Dr Afrim Blyta, a psychiatrist and a returned refugee working on behalf of the International Medical Corps, became the first doctor to enter this place in three months, he had to break the lock on the main gate to get in.
Inside, he found a sole Albanian nurse along with the corpse of an 11-year-old child. The little girl was skin and bone, her back a mass of bedsores, her big, brown eyes still open, framed by beautiful, long lashes. Her shroud was the rags she wore in life wrapped in a bed-sheet; her funeral bier a filthy, hospital stretcher, her hearse an old cart.
It must have been a merciful release. Around her for several weeks, the nurse said, unsupervised men and women had been copulating indiscriminately. A middle-aged woman was running amok with a long, thick piece of wood, roaring out a continuous stream of insults; a six year old of normal intelligence, born to her brain-damaged mother in this institution, stayed close to us, saying that her mother didn't want her (there has been no orphanage in Kosovo since the Serbs closed the Metrovica institution in 1991).
In foul-smelling dormitories, young boys lay motionless across filthy wooden benches, their heads and faces bruised and bloodied from constant banging against walls; in another ward, small, pale-faced children with terrible physical deformities lay in cots, rocking back and forth, back and forth; a listless, bedridden male, who looked around 25 with full beard and moustache, turned out to be a 13-year-old with a probable endocrinological condition.
A skeletal man followed us around repeating the words: "Food is in Pristina, food is in Pristina . . ."
Outside, in an outhouse which a visiting nurse described as the "idiots' place", a dozen men sat on a bench. One, said to be seriously violent, was folded into a foetal position with his arms and legs inside a large sweater; another sat with his hideously enlarged genitals exposed; several showed evidence of cuts and bleeding from fights and self-injury.
A personable 15-year-old ran up to us to say that he had to bury the little girl now: "It's my job and I have to finish it," he explained gravely.
Meanwhile, a 35-year-old gypsy Serb, sent here as a child, roamed the corridors, expertly coaxing haunting melodies from an accordion. Did he own the instrument? No, he said with a huge, proud smile; he had stolen it from the home of expelled Albanians.
The fact that they had survived at all for these last days is to the credit of Xhevvie Jakupi, the 35 year-old nurse who, with other nurses, had brought flour from their own homes to a bakery to make into bread for their starving patients. They drew water from the well in the grounds and treated it to make it drinkable. They changed sheets and swept floors and stalled the descent into anarchy.
"After 15 years working here, these people are like my children," said Nurse Jakupi, "that's why I could not leave them."
The irony in this conflict is that her "children" here in Shtimjle are both Serb and Albanian. The staff in this institution were also Serb and Albanian, 35 and 15, respectively, in nursing posts, who - up to a few weeks ago - rubbed along together, despite the fact that the top positions were all occupied by Serbs.
But these heroic Albanian nurses - on about $80 a month - long accustomed to hearing from the hospital pharmacy that many drugs were not available and that coffee was as scarce as diamonds, were astounded yesterday morning when Dr Blyta broke open the medical supply room. Laid out before them was a treasure trove.
"We found an extraordinary supply of drugs, everything you could ever need for these types of patients - tranquillisers, sedatives, hypnotics, neuroleptics - although they have been denied them for months. We also found a lot of drugs not usually seen for these categories of patient - supplies more appropriate to an internal medicine department."
With drugs of this remarkable range, quantity and value, he said, he could set up his own city pharmacy. Alongside the drugs were nearly 300 bags of coffee.
With the arrival of the IMC and the International Committee of the Red Cross, these abandoned creatures will soon have food, medicines and a kind of peace again.
Outside on the streets of a shattered Shtimjle, their fellow Albanians were walking the road again for the first time in three months, showering newly-arrived British soldiers with kisses, flowers and strawberries. They, too, were celebrating their freedom to live life again in a kind of peace. But with liberation comes terrible news long buried.
Thirteen people, including 10 children, were injured yesterday after a Serb threw a grenade at ethnic Albanians celebrating the departure of Yugoslav troops from Kosovo, local residents said.
The US charity, International Medical Corps, said that a 10 year-old child was evacuated from the south-eastern town of Gnjilane to Macedonia to be treated for a suspected fractured skull.
Last night in Pristina, Kosovo Albanians said Serb gunmen shot dead four people as NATO's deadline approached for Serb security forces to quit the city.