Berlin:
The announcement over the loudspeaker is almost drowned out by the buzz of passengers getting off the train from Warsaw, but it is a message many of them would have liked to hear: “Dear passengers from Ukraine, welcome to Berlin!”
Just over a week after Russia launched an attack on Ukraine, the trickle of war refugees entering Germany has swelled into a steady stream.
“The situation has changed dramatically,” said Katja Kipping, senator for social affairs in the city-state of Berlin.
On Tuesday evening alone, 1,300 refugees arrived by train in the German capital.
Mayor Franziska Giffey expects Berlin, less than 100 kilometers from Ukraine’s western neighbor Poland, to take in at least 20,000 Ukrainians in the coming weeks, and his city is urgently preparing emergency shelters.
The German Interior Ministry has officially registered more than 5,000 Ukrainian refugees so far. But given the lack of border controls between Poland and Germany, the real number is likely higher.
At Berlin Central Station, Ukrainian women and children make up the bulk of those arriving from Poland. They have left husbands, fathers and sons to fight against the advance of the Russian troops.
Among the newcomers is Nathalia Lypka, a German professor from the eastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhya who has fled with her 21-year-old daughter.
‘Anxious’
“We met in Lviv,” she told AFP, resting on a wooden bench set up by volunteers in a corner of the sprawling train station, one of the busiest in Europe.
“My daughter was in Kiev, it was terrible, she was scared and had to take shelter in the metro station” to protect herself from the shelling, she says.
“My husband and son stayed… My husband has already served in the military and he had to go back to work,” she adds.
Lypka and her daughter plan to then board the train to Stuttgart, where friends are waiting to take them in.
“We thank Europe for its support,” she adds.
Free tickets
While the Ukrainian influx pales in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of Syrians and Iraqis who fled their conflict-torn countries to Germany in 2015-2016, the scenes of refugees being greeted by voluntary welcoming committees are remarkably similar.
At Berlin station, volunteers dressed in yellow safety coats hand out bananas, sandwiches and water bottles to newcomers.
Some wear stickers on their chests stating that they speak Russian or Ukrainian. Others help bewildered newcomers plan onward journeys, taking advantage of train operator Deutsche Bahn’s offer to let Ukrainians travel for free.
Nearby, volunteers folding blankets and clothes pause to accept a German woman’s donation of anti-coronavirus face masks.
Elsewhere in the station, the Red Cross is standing by to provide first aid to the refugees or to arrange transport to the hospital for those who need more intensive care.
“Many people arrive here exhausted, they have headaches” and other pains, says Nicolas Schoenemann, who manages a team of five Red Cross workers.
Among those who come from Ukraine are also a significant number of people who are originally from Africa.
According to Liubov Abravitova, the Ukrainian ambassador to South Africa, about 16,000 African students lived in Ukraine before the Russian invasion.
Cameroonian Aurelien Kaze studied economics in Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine, which has been hit by Russian shelling.
“We heard the bombings, there was panic everywhere,” he says, waiting for a train to Brussels, where he has relatives.
The 25-year-old considers himself lucky to have had a smooth border crossing between Ukraine and Poland, following reports of racist behavior by border guards against Africans.
Kaze said it seems to have gone “a little easier” for him than for some of the others. “They checked my papers,” he recalls, and he was forwarded.
(This story was not edited by DailyExpertNews staff and was generated automatically from a syndicated feed.)