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.
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