Cities in the heart of Europe that have been divided by the tragic events of the 20th century are waiting impatiently for the eastwards expansion of the European Union on May 1 to tear down their barriers and customs checkpoints and get a new lease on life.

Perched on the left bank of the Neisse river, the German town of Goerlitz looks onto the renaissance towers of Poland's Zgorzelec, a smaller but more bustling city.

They were one and the same town for 850 years but were split up at Stalin's urging as Europe was carved up at the end of World War II in 1945.

"The enlargement of the European Union to include Poland is the only chance our town and region has of surviving," said Ulf Grossmann, the mayor of Goerlitz.

Miroslaw Fiedorowicz, his Polish counterpart at Zgorzelec, agrees: "If we do not take the chance offered by the EU enlargement, if we do not work together, we will disappear down a hole in the middle of Europe," he said.

On the same border, several other towns suffered the same fate. The German town of Silesia was parcelled out to the Poles in return for eastern Poland which was given to the Soviet Union.

On the border between Italy and Slovenia lies the town of Gorizia or Gorica, depending on whether you speak Italian or Slovenian, which has since 1974 been divided in two by a fence that cuts through private gardens and allows the two worlds to meet only at border posts.

The dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918 was more respectful of geography than the Paris Peace Treaty that followed World War II.

But several towns were nonetheless divided, including Cesky Tesin and Cieszin on the Polish-Czech border, Komarno and Komarom on the Danube river between Hungary and Slovakia and the even smaller city of Gmuend or Ceske Velenice on the Austro-Czech border.

Valga and Valka, on the frontier between Estonia and Lithuania, have been divided in two since 1920 and are pinning high hopes on their inclusion into the EU next year.

The current political divide between the two towns is such that they have not been able to get a joint education system off the ground.

Since the fall of communism, life has eased somewhat in the divided towns, especially those that were cut in two by the Iron Curtain.

But the border controls between the different parts have remained a long and tiresome process and it is near impossible to relocate your home across the border.

Goerlitz which today has a population of 63,000 saw a mass exodus after the reunification of Germany in 1990 and some 10,000 apartments are standing empty, most of them beautiful 16th century buildings that have been restored in the hope that new inhabitants would soon move in.

On the other side of the fence lies Zgorzelec with 35,000 inhabitants and a lack of accommodation for them.

"One solution would be to rent the apartments to Poles in Zgorzelec, but the laws forbid people to come and live on the other bank of the Neisse without a work or residency permit," Grossmann said.

"All of this will change after Poland joins the EU," he added.

But there will still be delays. On May 1, the border will disappear in the sense that there will be free circulation of merchandise but there will still be border controls for people, with passport verifications expected to continue until 2007, when a new security system will be set up to protect the EU's new borders.

Still, progress has already begun.

These days there is a bus service between Gorizia and Gorica.

In Goerlitz and Zgorzelec a joint, bi-lingual college has just opened its doors.

In Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, on the German side, the European university of Viadrana, which was founded in 1991, now gathers Polish and German students and lecturers.