Cold War centre gives warm welcome to 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 tomorrow 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 about 700 people at any one time.