EU: There are mixed feelings on both sides of the EU frontier as internal controls end, writes Derek Scally in Frankfurt-Oder
The Berlin-Warsaw express train is the ultimate cold war throwback. The staff are surly and the carriages are as old as the polyester flower arrangements on the dining car tables.
But from today the train loses one of its trademark cold war features: the armed border police who check passports as the train noses its way across the river Oder, the border since 1945.
"There was always an air of suspense with the passport checks on the train, that the guards would find someone who wasn't supposed be here," laughs Tomasz Markiewicz, a regular commuter between the two capitals. "It'll be strange when it's gone."
The last shadow of the Iron Curtain vanished at midnight, letting 400 million people in 24 EU countries move freely around the Continent.
You can now make the 4,500km trip from Narva in Estonia to Marbella in Spain without once producing your passport.
In the city of Frankfurt-Oder, on the German-Polish border, locals have given the new era a muted welcome.
"I'm not thrilled about it, I don't know what to expect," said Sonja, crossing the bridge over the river Oder to buy Polish cigarettes in the chilly December gloom.
"The papers are predicting a crime wave. I read that three times more house alarms than usual have been sold this year."
The mixed feelings among ordinary people here reflect the mixed signals coming from officials: some talk of a bright new era, while others worry that the border is being opened too soon, and at the price of security.
EU officials understand their concerns. "It is a fact that the enlargement of the 'Schengen zone' will, at first, reduce security," said Ikka Laitinen, director of Frontex, the EU agency that co-ordinates border protection with member states.
Initially, he says, the new regime will make it more difficult to track illegal migration and trafficking through the Continent.
"But this was wanted, politically. One accepts reduced security in exchange for freedom of movement and a greater East-West feeling of belonging together."
The original agreement to abolish border controls was signed in 1985 on a river boat in the Luxembourg town of Schengen and implemented a decade later.
Despite the exhaustive preparations, joining Schengen remains a step into the unknown for the nine new members.
Poland has by far the longest border to patrol: 1,200km. In recent months, Polish officials have displayed proudly their new border control equipment - computers, helicopters, motorbikes and even infra-red tracking devices. But no one can predict the effect Schengen will have on the Polish economy and the 500,000 Ukrainians and Belarussians who work illegally as cleaners, nurses and builders.
Oksana Owerko, a small 37-year-old woman, is just one of 12,000 people who leave the Ukrainian city of Lviv every morning and cross the border into Poland on a tourist visa.
She cleans five days a week in the nearby Polish town of Przemysl, earning 12 zloty (€3.30) an hour - three times what she could earn in Ukraine. Sometimes she smuggles cigarettes over the border and sells them at the bus station for three times the Ukrainian price.
"I do it for the money," she says. "But I'm not sure what I will do next year."
Neither are the officials in the Polish consulates in Ukraine who issued 635,000 90-day tourist visas last year, mostly for people with little interest in sight-seeing.
Half of those tourists visas are issued by the consulate in Lviv where, every morning, rain or shine, a queue begins to form behind the metal barriers outside. Middlemen float around the queue with tempting but expensive offers to speed up the application process.
On good days, the consulate issues up to 2,000 tourist visas a day, but from today, Schengen visas will cost at least €35. Applicants have to produce a letter of invitation stating the purpose of their visit and go through an interview.
"Until now we were very flexible, but our position is going to get very difficult," says consul Wieslaw Osuchowski. "Many Ukrainians don't understand the situation. Public opinion in Poland isn't very well prepared either."
Experts in Warsaw warn that the new Schengen regulations will spark a dramatic labour shortage in Poland of Ukrainian nurses, household help and carers for the elderly. "Ukrainian women are so popular here, that the very word 'Ukrainka' has become a synonym of 'female servant'," noted Poland's Work Intervention Association in a recent report.
The same goes for building sites, where Ukrainian workers have replaced Polish builders gone to Britain and Ireland.
Jura (31), from Lviv, came to Poland six years ago and works on a building site in Warsaw earning 15 zloty (€4) an hour. "Sometimes the site supervisor is the only Pole here," he says. "The big building companies are clean and only employ Poles, but nobody checks the subcontractors who do the actual work."
Like many illegal Ukrainians in Poland, he's going to take his chances here rather than risk being refused a visa at home. "One wall's gone and a new wall has gone up," says Jura. "Not an Iron Curtain but a wall of paper."