The refugee shelter at Berlin's Tegel airport, which houses 5,000 people, mostly from Ukraine, was only meant to be temporary. But some residents have been there for almost two years now and frustration is mounting. Berlin authorities say the problem is that there is nowhere else available to house everyone in the capital, which is already experiencing a housing crisis.
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00:00Alexandra and Katerina are annoyed. Once more there's no soap in the bathrooms.
00:06The two young women from Kiev have been living in Berlin's former airport Tegel for over six months now.
00:12It's Germany's largest refugee shelter.
00:16It's dirty here. The staff don't clean properly.
00:21I've lived in different blocks since I arrived in February and it's dirty everywhere.
00:25It's very loud, too.
00:27People are being moved on to other accommodation, especially the sick and people with disabilities.
00:32That's the big problem here.
00:36How many live in a room?
00:38Sixteen people to a room.
00:41To protect the refugees' privacy, we're not permitted to film inside the sleeping quarters.
00:47One resident, though, sent us a video to show how she's living there.
00:55Seventy-seven-year-old Lyubmila Shcherbina is outraged.
00:59She, too, wants to voice her complaints to us, as do many others.
01:05There are people who get housing after two, three or seven months.
01:10Then others like me get nothing after one and a half, two years.
01:14Where's the justice in that? Why is it like that?
01:20Around 5,000 refugees are being housed in 40 lightweight buildings.
01:24Most have come from Ukraine and are in this emergency shelter against their will.
01:29Originally, it was supposed to be a reception center for Ukrainian refugees.
01:33But with housing in Berlin ever scarcer, time in Tegel has dragged out.
01:37Some have now been living there for almost two years.
01:40We can't tell people we don't have anything.
01:43We have to house everyone. It's our legal mandate.
01:46As more people have arrived, we've had to lower the standards.
01:49What we're seeing here in Tegel is not up to our normal housing standards.
01:53But that's because a large number of people have arrived in a very short time.
01:58Over the past two years, a city within a city has emerged.
02:02Over 1,400 staff members keep everything running.
02:05Sport halls, nail salons, canteens, doctors, libraries and child care.
02:10Around a third of the Ukrainian refugees have found jobs.
02:14Now their children must be taken care of.
02:17The shelter costs half a billion euros a year to run.
02:24It's a highly expensive form of housing.
02:27It's labor-intensive and has very high operating costs.
02:31We have extremely high levels of consumption with electricity, oil and rental costs for the halls.
02:39So while the standards of the space we are providing are the lowest,
02:43it's by far also the most expensive way to accommodate people.
02:47But there's nowhere else in the city where we can open up so many spaces so quickly.
02:56Daily, the staff at Tegel are on the receiving end of complaints
03:00and are sometimes even physically attacked.
03:03Words of praise are rare.
03:07For the unskilled work I do here,
03:11I earn ten times what a qualified worker in Ukraine does.
03:16I work as a janitor in a hotel.
03:20Overall, I'm satisfied with the way things are.
03:25I'm grateful to German society and its people.
03:30Staff at the shelter are preparing to accommodate hundreds more refugees soon,
03:35some from Ukraine, maybe also from Lebanon.
03:38They find the accusations unfair.
03:41Contact with the local population is also needed for people to truly settle here.
03:46That's something that a city can only achieve collectively, though.
03:50That's exactly the problem at Tegel.
03:52It's like an island.
03:54It's outside of normal city life.
03:57We're constantly surprised that some people have no idea
04:00that 5,000 people are being housed at the former airport.
04:03People can almost forget about the refugees here.
04:06Of course that's a problem.
04:1121-year-old Alexandra wants to take matters into her own hands.
04:15She says waiting is making her sick.
04:18That's why she and her husband are taking the initiative to learn German on their own.