Warsaw, Poland ? After a continent-wide round of commemorations to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, it’s clear that the peoples of Europe have a shared past but not a common one.

Sixty years on, the memory of war in Warsaw is still irreconcilable with that in Moscow. But it’s also utterly different from London’s low-key festival of “We’ll meet again” nostalgia. Only in the recollections of former British inmates of the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps does British memory approach the horrors of daily degradation that are the stuff of everyday Polish or Russian memory.

For Russians, the war began in 1941; for Poles and Brits, it began in 1939. For Vladimir V. Putin, May 9, 1945, marked the end of the Great Patriotic War, when the Red Army almost single-handedly liberated — yes, liberated — most of Europe from fascism. For most Estonians, Lithuanians and Latvians, it marked the transition from one totalitarian occupation to another, Nazi to Soviet.

Really, we shouldn’t talk about the Second World War, but about the Second World Wars. The plural applies inside as well as between countries. I am staying not far from where the Warsaw ghetto used to be. The wartime memories of a Polish Jew and a non-Jewish Pole can still be bitterly contrasting. So can German memories. Last weekend there was a small neo-Nazi demonstration in Berlin. The former left-wing terrorist Horst Mahler, now an extremist at the other end of the spectrum, said the moment of German surrender in 1945 marked “the day of the death of Europe.” But Tuesday’s opening of the Holocaust memorial in the heart of Berlin spoke for the great majority of today’s Germans. They are struggling to find a just balance between a sense of collective historical responsibility for Nazism and a proper respect for the sufferings of their own compatriots, including those who died as a result of Anglo-American bombing or were expelled from their homes by Russians and Poles.

Only by great effort of collective myth-making have the French combined the memories of the resistance France of Charles de Gaulle and the collaborating France of Marshal Petain. Across the Mediterranean. the Algerians marking May 8, 1945, the anniversary of the Setif massacre, when a V-E Day demonstration turned into a protest for Algerian independence, which descended into bloodshed and a brutal crackdown by French security forces.

A common past? Forget it! The memory wars began the day World War II ended. “Who controls the past controls the future” was George Orwell’s formula for a totalitarian regime. In Europe, we no longer live in totalitarian times — even in increasingly undemocratic Russia and the grim dictatorship of Belarus. So today’s milder version is, “Who shapes our view of the past influences the future.”

What is to be done? First, we should recognize that it will always be so — even when every last survivor is dead. As long as there are historical memories, they will be contested memories.

Second, we must insist that there are historical facts. When any body politic starts denying or suppressing historical facts, that is a warning sign, like the spots indicating measles. The Soviet Union had historiographical measles for all its life. Russia after 1991 got better, and many Russian schoolchildren had access to a textbook that taught them about the extraordinary sacrifices of Red Army soldiers — but also mentioned Stalin’s occupation of the Baltic states and his wartime deportations of Balts and others. Now that schoolbook has been withdrawn.

That every European should have full access to the facts about the barbarous past is a precondition for the political health of the continent. The interpretation of those facts is then free.

Thirdly, although we will never agree on a single version of the historical truth about these events, we can agree on a lesson from them. This lesson for 2005 is the promise of 1945: Never Again! In order to keep that promise to ourselves, we need to shape not a common past but a common future. A Polish student from the town of Oswiecim — that is, Auschwitz — explained on German television the other day that his Polish-German-Jewish bridge-building work was aimed not at the old-fashioned goal of “reconciliation” but at building a “common future.” Exactly so. And that’s what we are doing with the spread of freedom and enlargement of the European Union.

I remember seeing in Berlin, the day after the wall came down, a fresh graffito: “Only today is the war really over.” Now we are waiting for the day when we read those same words on a Moscow wall, in a democratic Russia finally liberated from the weight of the past. That would be the ultimate V-E Day.

Timothy Garton Ash is professor of European studies at Oxford University.