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.
Freed from Hamas captivity, former hostage tells his story through his paintings