[1] Lok Cahana was a teenage inmate in the Auschwitz-Birkenau, Guben and Bergen-Belsen camps:[2] her most well-known works are her writings and abstract paintings about the Holocaust.

[4] While imprisoned at Guben concentration camp, Lok Cahana made her first work of art in response to the Nazis mandating the children to decorate the barracks for Christmas.

Her exposure to the works of Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland, color field painters collected by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, all contributed to the development of her mature style.

That there was no memorial to the vast numbers of Jews who had once played an important social, cultural, and economic role in Hungarian society, who had been dragged from their homes and sent to Nazi death camps, shocked her to the point that she felt she could no longer paint abstractions.

[7] After her return from Hungary Lok Cahana began to create work through a new kind of mark-making, employing collage, along with an abstract visual language that could more directly express her memorial to the dead.

It was during this period that she created a series dedicated to Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who handed out fake passports to Jews targeted for the death camps, saving more than 20,000 people, including Lok Cahana's father.

The "surface of her carefully structured compositions are subject to various processes: burned, scratched, stained with blood red pigment; the images are grafted, buried, partially eaten away.