Cold War centre for East German escapees now houses world's refugees

East Germans fleeing communism were once housed there. Now a centre in the German capital provides refuge to people who have escaped war and misery from Afghanistan to Africa.

A section of the Berlin Wall that fell 35 years ago this Saturday still stands as a silent reminder of the Cold War at the entrance to the residential centre.

Back then, many who escaped post-war Germany's Soviet-occupied east were housed in the centre's dozen or so blocks in the charmless Berlin suburb of Marienfelde.

Until 1989, when the German Democratic Republic collapsed, more than 1.3 million people passed through the "emergency camp" in then-West Berlin, before most of them found new homes in what was West Germany.

Today, Arabic, Afghan and African voices can be heard in the tree-lined courtyard of the facility that first opened in 1953 and which still houses some 700 people at any one time.

Newcomers still pass through the entrance hall "with all their suitcases and whatever they could take with them", said the centre's director Olivija Music.

One of them is 22-year-old Syrian Layan Al-Jazzar who arrived from Jordan last winter with her sister Lara, 26, and their mother Amina, 57, and who now shares a modest two-room apartment with them.

When the three women first came, she said, "we were crying all the time together because we didn't speak the language and didn't know anyone here."

Even today, Jazzar said, she only leaves the centre to go to her German language lessons, explaining that in the unfamiliar city, "I'm scared to go alone, that's why I'm sitting at home all the time."

The Marienfelde centre's history is no longer "linked only to German-German migration, but also to a very diverse migration," said Bettina Effner, who runs a small museum adjacent to the site.

After German reunification in 1990, the facility housed many ethnic Germans who came from eastern Europe as the Soviet Union collapsed.

As that influx eased off, the site eventually closed for a few months in 2010, but was then reopened for refugees from war-torn Iraq.

In the museum, videos retrace refugees' journeys from Syria or Afghanistan and newcomers are also introduced to the history of the German refugees who came before them.

Immigration has become a hot-button topic in Germany and beyond, driving the rise of far-right parties such as the Alternative for Germany (AfD).

The AfD has made strong gains, especially in eastern Germany, in the decade since the country saw an influx of more than one million asylum seekers from Syria and other conflict zones.

The museum can't take "political positions", said Effner, but she said it aims to explore questions on "what it means for people to leave... what kind of society they are entering, and what kind of society they want."