W. Berlin Striving to Find Beds for E. Germans

Officials in West Berlin’s main refugee reception center scrambled Monday to provide an extra 1,000 beds for the influx of East Germans they expect to arrive in the next few days.

Unlike the tent camps being hastily put up in Bavaria near the Austrian border, the additional beds here will be in permanent buildings, center director Harald Fiss said.

“We have 240 separate locations in West Berlin where we are putting up refugees from Eastern Europe,” he said, pointing to a map in his office in the Marienfelde district.

“We are very short on accommodations in West Berlin, but we heard that 10,000 to 15,000 East Germans vacationing in Hungary may be coming to West Germany any day--so we have to do our part, too.”

All the refugee facilities in West Germany are sorely overtaxed, and Marienfelde is no exception.

About 18,000 East Germans and ethnic Germans from Poland and the Soviet Union are currently being housed temporarily in West Berlin, with the average stay being about nine months, Fiss said.

Perhaps the luckiest newcomers are those from East Berlin since they are only moving across town--even if by way of Hungary and Austria--and West Berlin is much less of a wrench for them than it is for ethnic Germans from Poland.

“Those from Poland were not able to learn German in school so they must be taught the language,” said the 42-year old Fiss, who has been dealing with refugees for four years at the center, which resembles a low-rise public housing development.

“They will have greater difficulties finding jobs and apartments.”

Further, Polish Germans are sometimes scorned by those from East Germany--as well as by West Berliners--as somehow only second-class Germans, officials say.

And all the refugees face intense competition among West Berliners, and its large Turkish population, for jobs and housing.

Rain at Campsites

On Monday, the West German government awaited the expected influx of East Germans from Hungary, having set up several sprawling tent camps in Bavaria with a capacity of 4,500 people. But heavy weekend rains have made their habitability questionable.

Some local Bavarian newspapers described the conditions in the tent camps as primitive.

And on Monday the German magazine Stern released an interview with Hungarian Interior Minister Istvan Horvath, in which he said that both the East German and West German governments would have to reach agreement on the refugees before Budapest would allow them to cross the Austrian border.

Horvath said that, given the hard-line position of East Germany, such a solution to the refugee crisis could take up to six weeks.

East Germany wants Hungary to observe a bilateral agreement not to let East Germans cross into Austria without proper exit documents.

“It is not up to us to persuade East Germany to agree to a solution,” Horvath told Stern. “West Germany should do that.”

In the refugee center here, one family, which asked not to be identified by name, took the long way round from East Berlin to West Berlin last week. The family consists of a man and wife, a son, a daughter and her fiance--all of whom lived in the Pankow district of East Berlin.

Like many others fleeing East Germany, the family is young and skilled: the parents are in their late 30s; he is a factory foreman; the children are in their late teens; the prospective son-in-law is an electrician, the sort of people the Communist regime cannot easily afford to lose.

“We got fed up with the lack of political rights,” said the father, who wore a colorful sweater and slacks. “There was no possibility of travel, except to Eastern Europe; there was no free press to read or television to watch. We had no information on what was going on in China.

“We could see the news on the West Berlin station but not from our own media. We thought the country was getting more regimented: soldiers, discipline, militarized schools, even sports were that way.”

His wife added: “You could never get what you wanted in the stores. Everything was unavailable or too expensive--fruits, vegetables, meat. We had difficulty getting food with vitamins.”

Sensing no liberalization to come, the family secured vacation visas for Hungary and drove off in their small, four-door Wartburg sedan, which they had waited 10 years to purchase.

They arrived at a camping site near the Austrian border and there met a helpful Austrian vacationer who gave them a map delineating an area at the border that he said was unguarded.

“We made up our minds the first night,” the husband said. “We left everything behind--our car, our tents, our heavy baggage--and took only things we could carry.”

‘Austrian Pointed the Way’

The Austrian drove them to a woods less than two miles from the frontier and pointed the way. The father had a good field compass and used it to direct the family to the wire fence along the frontier.

“The fence was still up,” he said, “but we found a big hole in it, made by the Austrians, I think. We heard some warning shooting by border guards in the distance, but it was not directed at us. So we slipped through the fence. The Austrians had put out welcome signs so we knew we were out of Hungary.”

That was a week ago: the family got a lift to Vienna and travel documents and tickets at the West German Embassy there, allowing them to go the Schoeppingen camp in northern Germany.

But because they are East Berliners and have relatives in West Berlin, they qualified to come to Marienfelde here.

“We like Berlin,” the father said. “Why go anywhere else? I think we’ll find jobs and places to live before too long.”