Berlin sounds the alarm as flow of Ukrainian refugees grows

Two parallel realities have yet to coalesce at Berlin’s steel-and-glass central station. Upstairs in the afternoon sun, bored commuters head home on the suburban trains; two floors below, exhausted Ukrainians queue for food. War and peace, two escalator rides apart.

In a disused corner of the train station, a pop-up bazaar offers food, clothes, dog food, cat litter. Amid the busy volunteers in hi-vis vests and soup-supping elderly women in woolly hats stands 18-year-old Ivan from Kharkiv. Tall and wan, with dark curly hair and exhausted eyes, he arrived on Thursday with his mother. His father stayed to fight, his grandparents are too old to travel and Ivan looks too exhausted to cry.

“The buildings I know all my life are destroyed, completely destroyed,” he said. “We just called my family, it’s not okay but they are alive.”

Just before 5pm on platform 13 and another train, heavy with passengers, groans in from the east. After Polish cities, Berlin has fast become Germany’s front line. Some 13,000 people arrived here in the last three days, according to official figures and, like the wider EU, Germany’s 16 federal states have yet to agree a distribution key for refugees.

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Army called in

On Thursday, with forecasts of 10,000 new daily arrivals soon, Berlin mayor Franziska Giffey sounded the alarm – and called in the army.

“We have reached a point where we need 1,000 beds every evening,” she said. “As a city, Berlin has been really hit by this situation, more than other federal states, and can expect the support of federal partners.”

As the city reactivated refugee accommodation from 2015, no one here is ruling out requisitioning sports halls once more. Besides beds and food, record Covid-19 infection rates this week mean health authorities are battling to give jabs to the largely unvaccinated arrivals.

Some 800km to the east, German federal interior minister Nancy Faeser visited the Polish-Ukrainian border crossing on Thursday with her Polish and French colleagues.

“It is a European task to help those who have fled, that is what has priority now,” said Faeser.

Back in Berlin, though, the priority is to get through another day. The improvised train station arrival centre has grown and expanded in the last two weeks to cope with the surge in arrivals. In recent days matching arrivals to accommodation has moved largely online and outside, to a city-run tent on the plaza before the train station. Until two days ago, one volunteer says, arrivals were being matched up with potential hosts via megaphone.

“We had a man calling out ‘woman, two children’ and people holding up their hands to take them,” said the volunteer. “It was terrible, like a slave market.”

Behind her, the setting sun strikes the glass dome of the Reichstag building, seat of the Bundestag parliament. On Thursday it was announced that, next week, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy will address MPs via video link from an undisclosed location.

Controlled chaos

Back underground in the train station, watching the controlled chaos from a corner is 38-year-old Artem Seleznov. He fled from the village of Moshny near Cherkasy after attacks on February 24th threatened the local chemical plant, containing 5,000 tonnes of ammonia.

“If the factory is hit, the whole village will die,” he said, describing his flight over the border to Moldova and his trip to Berlin via Budapest. “I fled illegally, men are forbidden to leave Ukraine. My friends are happy I am here but most people I met called me a traitor.”

Listening nearby is Matthias, a middle-aged Berliner. He is looking for someone to take his spare room, like thousands of others before him.

“Take away the down jackets and the roller suitcases and this looks like how my mother described 1945 here in Berlin,” he said.

As we speak, news comes through that Gerhard Schröder, the German ex-chancellor turned Russian energy lobbyist, is in Moscow to meet president Vladimir Putin. The German government says it knew nothing of the trip and Matthias said he is doubtful Schröder can get through to Putin.

“But why not give it a go, what is there to lose?” he asked. “So much has been destroyed already: lives, cities and decades of trust.”