It occurs to me that, if millions of Polish and East European Jews were killed by the Nazis, these countries would have been littered with abandoned Jewish towns, quarters and villages at the end of the war. It would have been like Oradour-sur-Glane in France, which has been preserved to this day as a memorial, but on a thousand-fold greater scale. Yet one never sees photographs of these abandoned townships in holocaust documentaries. Perhaps they are not dramatic enough.
Is there any research on this?
The term you're looking for is shtetl. Most of these were between 1/3 to 2/3 Jewish, and many were destroyed in the war wholesale then rebuilt or allowed to decline into backwater villages. There were very few exclusively Jewish towns or villages and therefore no comparison can exist with Oradour.
It's also important to remember that there were massive population transfers in 1945; Poles left Galicia and Volhynia while Ukrainians from Lublin were sent east, resulting in great needs for housing stock. Most Jewish homes if they had not been destroyed already in the ghetto liquidation or by subsequent military action were rapidly taken over by non-Jews, who then tended to forget there were ever Jews there, for various reasons - often because they hadn't lived there before the war. Galicia and Volhynia were subjected to a double erasure since almost all Poles were forced out during and after the war. This isn't a uniquely Jewish issue.
Proper village level is a different matter; there are
hundreds of burned villages in Belarus and Russia that were never rebuilt, whose physical remnants are now frequently just a single memorial marker or maybe the foundations of a house. But those villages weren't inhabited by Jews.
There is plenty to read on the aftermath and long term impact of the 'death of the shtetl'. Omer Bartov's book Erased documents some of the dynamics for Eastern Galician examples, and most of the regional studies do the same thing for other areas. Memorial books exist in Polish for e.g. Rzeszow province showing a massive variation in how the physical sites of mass murder have been commemorated. Since in most cases there were relatively few survivors to return after the war, opportunities to create memorials quickly were few. Some communities however could rebury their dead from the Nazi mass grave to a Jewish cemetery. In recent decades there has been a certain rediscovery of the Jewish heritage on a local level in Eastern Europe, but this is stronger in the west than the east; there are no signs other than decaying Jewish cemeteries that there were Jews in e.g. Bialowieza.
One of the purposes of Yahad In Unum is to record the patterns of memorials, mass grave sites and local memories. Their researchers talk of visiting former shtetls where there is no effort to care for anything partially because half the town connived in the mass murder of the other half of the town, while in other localities the entire town is still in a state of collective trauma because of the day when in September 1942 half the town was exterminated.
Belarus has historically been somewhat better than western Ukraine with these issues; there are reference works on memorials in Belarus because there are so many, and a fair number predating the fall of communism.
Same in Russia; local residents in Roslavl, Smolensk oblast, quietly campaigned in the 1960s for a memorial while also gathering stories about the victims, in an entirely independent and very, very silent project (since it was not under state control). I've seen the writings, notes and interview transcripts of the chief campaigner (a teacher). They are a remarkable example of civic activism in a hostile dictatorial environment; and a very moving set of documents because the stories are so intensely local.
I'd also add that there has been some really interesting ethnography by anthropologists, eg Rosa Lehman, Symbiosis and Ambivalence, on memories of the Jews of Jaslika in western Galicia, and Alina Cala, The Image of the Jew in Polish Folk Culture.
Oh, and see above quote.
