The last time Berlin’s central station saw so many flags and crowds was 2006, when the German capital’s gleaming glass palace to rail travel opened in time for the World Cup.
Today the flags are all one colour – blue and yellow – and the crowds are not soccer fans but ashen-faced Ukrainians, spilling out from trains arriving from the east.
“Everything is broken, everything was destroyed around us, we hid in the storage room and decided to run away,” said Malik, a 42-year-old restaurant owner from Kharkiv. “We are going to another city in Germany, we don’t know the name, but my cousin lives there.”
When Russia invaded Ukraine last month, an estimated 400 people arrived in Berlin by train the next day. By Thursday evening, rail operator Deutsche Bahn said the number was 6,000 and growing exponentially.
It takes just eight hours for the direct train from the Ukrainian-Polish border crossing at Przemysl to travel through Krakow and Wroclaw to the heart of the the city. When the silver Polish train screeches to a halt, doors hiss open and weary, weeping travellers fall into each others’ arms on the narrow platform.
“They are shooting people who have nothing to do with the army or war,” said Nadja, a middle-aged Ukrainian woman choking back tears. “I ask all the world to help us, we have fled our homeland.”
Stewards in hi-vis vests direct crowds one floor below to an arrival centre where they are given food, hygiene products and, if needed, a bed for the night. In just seven days Berlin authorities have activated 10 refugee centres but, with one million people on the move so far and the German capital already a focal point, they know this is just the beginning.
“We have to assume that what is building here is the biggest refugee movement in Europe since the second World War,” said Katja Kipping, Berlin city senator for social affairs. “I would ask the federal government to get active and step up co-ordination of federal states, we have no time to lose.”
Memories of the 2015 refugee crisis are still fresh here, in particular Berlin’s struggle to cope with waves of people seeking refuge from Syria, Afghanistan and northern Africa.
This time the arrivals are largely women and children, and they are allowed file for residency permits. While many arrive by rail and stay at reception centres, countless more are arriving by car and bus. About 350 hungry and exhausted people arrived on Friday morning at Berlin’s central bus station, according to a spokeswoman for the Order of Malta.
At the height of the 2015 refugee crisis, politician Mario Czaja was the state of Berlin’s social affairs senator. Now he is head of the local Red Cross and general secretary of the Bundestag’s opposition Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Just as urgent as the need for translators and psychologists to help traumatised, disoriented arrivals, he said, is to realise that Ukraine’s central European neighbours cannot be left alone with the burden.
“Everything will happen much faster because Ukraine is a lot closer than the Syrian war,” he told Berlin’s Inforadio. “If we cannot get voluntary distribution of people in Europe, and that is the case until now, European leaders will have to come together and discuss contingents.”
As politicians talk, locals act, bringing clothes and toys to the railway station and to centres around the city. In the western neighbourhood of Wilmersdorf, buses carrying 105 orphans from a Jewish residential home in Odesa arrived after a two-day, 1,700km journey. The eldest is 20, the youngest a baby born in January.
Back on the platform of Berlin’s central train station, people stand with makeshift signs, in Latin and Cyrillic lettering, offering spare rooms, sofa beds and lifts in all directions. They have come from Schleswig-Holstein in the north and Bavaria in the south.
One floor below the arrivals, a young blonde woman in German army fatigues hugs her partner, weeping quietly, then steps on to the escalator to the platform overhead and a train heading east.
As another wave of arrivals from the east poured into Berlin on Friday, the city’s Tagesspiegel newspaper wondered aloud: “Will this be 2015 again – or 1945?”
