Soon after his first visit to Palestine and his Zionist conversion, Janco began painting landscapes in optimistic tones, including a general view over Tiberias and bucolic watercolors. By the time of World War II, however, he was again an Expressionist, fascinated with the major existential themes. The war experience inspired his 1945 painting "Fascist Genocide", which is also seen by Grigorescu as one of his contributions to Expressionism. Janco's sketches of the Bucharest Pogrom are, according to cultural historian David G. Roskies, "extraordinary" and in complete break with Janco's "earlier surrealistic style"; he paraphrases the rationale for this change as: "Why bother with surrealism when the world itself has gone crazy?" According to the painter's own definition: "I was drawing with the thirst of one who is being chased around, desperate to quench it and find his refuge." As he recalled, these works were not well received in the post-war Zionist community, because they evoked painful memories in a general mood of optimism; as a result, Janco decided to change his palette and tackle subjects which related exclusively to his new country. An exception to this self-imposed rule was the motif of "wounded soldiers", which continued to preoccupy him after 1948, and was also thematically linked to the wartime massacres.