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Freed from Hamas captivity, former hostage tells his story through his paintings
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Andrei Kozlov, an artist who was taken hostage by Hamas during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, speaks with The Associated Press during an interview Monday, May 19, 2025, at his studio in New York.
NEW YORK (AP) — You’d be forgiven for looking around Andrei Kozlov’s studio, dotted with paintings inspired by his eight months as a hostage of Hamas, and seeing only darkness — canvases splashed with gray and ocher, guns tucked into waistbands or resting against a wall, moments of angst and disbelief and pain. He is a free man now, who often lets a wide smile spread across his face, who can’t believe his luck of surviving it all, and who urges you to look further. A painting of a blackened street his captors led him down is drowned in darkness, but in the distance is a sliver of cerulean sky.