The sight in Berlin Central Station is different on Thursday than two days earlier. It’s still teeming with refugees from Ukraine and volunteers in yellow vests. Arriving people are advised on the crossing over the underground long-distance railway tracks, Ukrainians can get tickets here for onward travel, and behind glass walls there is a painting street and a play corner for children.
In the adjacent passageway to the subway, however, BVG people are busy tearing down hand-drawn information sheets and folding up benches. The clothing offers for children have disappeared. A place to sleep that had been created in the hall over the past two days is cleared away, the mattresses thrown in a heap – all for fire safety reasons. “The escape routes must be cleared,” says a BVG man. Fire protection is also the reason that the signs in Ukrainian colors that have been put up have now been collected. Numerous police officers are on site. They are on the lookout for pimps who offer dubious sleeping arrangements to women traveling alone, or for other gentlemen who specifically approach Ukrainian women. According to a spokesman, the federal police had received corresponding reports in the past few days.
The tightness in which helpers and refugees have pushed each other in the past few days is to be equalized. The arrival tent on Washingtonplatz next to the train station, which opened on Wednesday, also serves this purpose. “The BVG passage should continue to be used for the refugees,” says Markus Falkner, spokesman for the transport company. “It will be converted into a waiting area for people who travel on to other cities.”
Around 9,000 refugees arrived at the main train station alone on Wednesday. According to the social administration, 900 of them were housed in Berlin, including in the Kreuzberg ballroom, which was opened as an emergency shelter on Thursday night. Many Ukrainian refugees want to continue their journey independently – by train or by bus that is waiting at Europaplatz.
For those who want to stay in Berlin there is the tent next to the train station where people are advised and from where they are taken in buses to the arrival center in Reinickendorf. Sometimes there is still confusion among those arriving who have lost their way in the tent because they don’t really want to stay in Berlin and have other plans.
The tent is operated by the Berlin City Mission. Their spokeswoman Barbara Breuer says that the tent has been well received: “Yesterday the walls in the children’s corner were still snow-white, now they are full of pictures.”
Because of the ongoing rush, according to those involved, there is talk of opening another arrival tent on the other side of the station, at Europaplatz. The tent set up there by the Federal Agency for Technical Relief, in which donations of clothing were accepted and handed out until recently, is now closed. These are now available in the accommodations.
Stefan Strauß, spokesman for the Senate Department for Social Affairs, says: “The processes have to be tried out. There are changes every day.”