As gunshots rang out through the Nova music festival grounds on Oct. 7, 2023, Andrei Kozlov, bewildered and terrified, jumped into a car with two strangers he thought were fleeing to safety.
Ten minutes into the harrowing ride, he realized an ugly truth.
The car was headed to Gaza. He was being kidnapped. He was a hostage of Hamas.
Kozlov was one of hundreds captured and held by the Palestinian terrorist organization that attacked Israel that day. About 1,200 Israelis were killed in massacres across communities and military bases in southern Israel.
Now 28, he is free after being held for 246 days in Gaza. He was rescued by soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on June 8, 2024.
The memories remain. And now he shares them with others in artwork he’s creating.
His paintings will be on display to the public at the Lux Contemporary Gallery in New York City for three weeks starting in the first week of June. The plan is for the exhibit to travel to other cities after that.
The exhibition will include “Highway to Hell,” an acrylic on canvas depicting Kozlov’s terror-filled car ride from the music festival massacre into Gaza.
Other works planned for the exhibition reveal other glimpses of his time as a hostage—scenes of misery but also hope.
Kozlov is a secular Russian-Israeli. He has lived mainly in New York and became an Israeli citizen just six months before his capture.
While held in captivity by Hamas terrorists, he coped by drawing, an interest he’d had since childhood.
Now, as a free man, he has a new dream.
He wants to share his art with the world.
“I want to share my point of view,” he told The Epoch Times.
Coping in Captivity
During his first two months in captivity, Kozlov and two other hostages held with him were shuffled from place to place, he said.The seventh move put the hostages in a room in an apartment for six months.
The number of their captors varied. Kozlov said he doesn’t know exactly how many there were.
He saw a few dozen, and there was always at least one captor in the room where he and his fellow hostages stayed.
Would he be allowed to live?
Or would he be killed?
These were questions that filled his thoughts depending on his captors’ erratic behavior, he said.
At one moment, he and the other hostages could be eating breakfast in relative peace.
These times of calm could be interrupted by captors suddenly walking in from another room, pointing Kalashnikov rifles at them.
At times, shackles prevented him from moving much. When he wasn’t shackled, he was allowed sometimes to do push-ups and squats for exercise.
He and fellow hostages mostly ate pita and rice for their meals, which were no more than twice a day. The frequent hunger melted 15 pounds from his athletic frame.
Kozlov recalled being allowed to shower and change clothes once a week. At one of the places he was held, the only item provided for toileting was a basket in a corner.
But he’s sure the conditions he and his fellow hostages faced were better than the conditions faced by those held in terrorists’ tunnels. About half of his captors treated hostages well, he said.
“And with them,“ Kozlov said, ”we were able to communicate and to complain about something—try to, somehow, to influence them.”
These captors were persuaded to bring medicine and extra clothing, he said.
One of the captors, Abdallah Aljamal, sometimes hit the hostages, locked them in the bathroom, or piled blankets on them, despite the blistering Gaza heat.
Sometimes, Aljamal’s mood changed. He would play cards with Kozlov and the others.
To help himself cope, Kozlov eventually asked his captors for paper and a pencil. He received a 16-page notebook.
And he began to draw.
From memory, Kozlov brought characters from movies to life on his paper. He drew Davy Jones from “Pirates of the Caribbean” and Spider-Man.
Starting in January 2024, he drew almost every day. It was a way to stay out of a mental jail while physically held in captivity, he said.
“I started to express myself and to remember what feelings I had all this time,” he said. “What feelings I want to feel when I will be home ...
“You can be physically in captivity, but you can be mentally free. You can be in one place, but you can think about whatever you want. You can think about yourself, first of all, whatever you want, about them, what you think they are.”
His first sketches were positive, including a shirtless, bald, skinny man standing in front of a source of light.
To Kozlov, it was a “symbol of freedom.”
He wanted his artistic endeavors to demonstrate to his family one day that being held hostage did not break him. In all, he thinks he completed about 30 drawings.
But in May 2024, one of his captors became angry with him and took away the notebook. He didn’t say why.
“He tried to find some mistakes that I did during the last couple of months,” Kozlov said.
He didn’t think he'd made any mistakes.
Rescued
A month later, Israeli soldiers stormed in to rescue Kozlov and the other hostages.Since then, the building where he was held was destroyed by the Israeli military.
He has not asked for help recovering the drawings.
“It’s ridiculous to ask soldiers to go there only because of my pain,” he said. “It’s under concrete rocks.”
The chance of finding the artwork, he said, is “impossible.”
‘Highway to Hell’
One of Kozlov’s most striking paintings is “Highway to Hell.” It shows him shirtless in the front-passenger seat of a car, gripping a handle above his window. A man in the back seat of the car points forward, appearing to guide the driver.As they sped away from the music festival as Hamas attacked, Kozlov suddenly realized he wasn’t heading toward safety.
He was headed to Gaza. With terrorists. To captivity.
“The biggest disappointment in my life, probably,” he said.
Another painting, “Maybe,” shows a narrow pathway between two walls that look to be closing in. But in the distance, a sliver of light shines through, representing freedom. Or hope, he said.
The work represents his recollection of constantly being moved from place to place as a hostage.
Part of the work’s description includes a quote from Kozlov: “My legs felt paralyzed with fear, not knowing if I would make it out of the alley—or if I wouldn’t.”
Another painting shows Kozlov looking in the mirror at himself as a hostage, a man clearly in despair.
Yet another work represents the day Kozlov was rescued. It shows narrow beams of light piercing the darkness.
An Israeli soldier was killed in the rescue operation.
The grateful artist calls the work depicting that moment “Fallen Angel.”
Still more paintings are spilling out of him onto canvases.
One in progress shows a blue man sitting with his hands on his head in a state of despair. The image was inspired by the “Blue Period” of Spanish artist Pablo Picasso.
Kozlov also finds inspiration in the works of French painter Claude Monet and Russian and French artist Marc Chagall.
Another piece still in progress shows three captors in a posture of Muslim prayer, kneeling on a prayer rug looking toward Mecca. They are worshipping at a distance.
“They prayed five times a day,” Kozlov recalled.
“They invited us to pray with them together, but they didn’t force us. So we had some freedom.”
Kozlov said he wanted nothing to do with his captors’ religious rituals. Instead, he meditated to feel at peace with himself in the moment, to stay calm, and to maintain his strength.
“If somebody will call them on the phone and they will order them to kill us, they will do this,” he said. “They are not my friends.”
The title of the piece showing the men praying is “One God.”
“It is showing how we all pray to one God,” said Emanuel Friedman, Kozlov’s gallerist. “But when you look into the bedroom from where the prayers are coming from, it completely contradicts holiness and religion.
“Working with Andrei feels like a huge nod to my grandmother, who was a Holocaust survivor. Spending every day with him reminds me of all the stories she would tell me about how to never forget and never let anti-Semitism plague this earth ever again,” Friedman said.
Life After Captivity
Kozlov has been interested in creating works of art since he was 6.“I understood already in my childhood that I have some talent, but I didn’t improve it enough because I didn’t want to do it on [a] professional level,” he said.
He painted with watercolors, then started with oil paints seven years ago.
In the first three months following his rescue, Kozlov immersed himself in time with family, going to the beach and traveling throughout Israel.
“It’s the most important thing that we have—people that are close to us,” he said. “Friends. Family.”
Then, he decided it was time to try to process what he’d endured by putting it on canvas.
For four months, he worked in the Los Angeles studio of Israeli artist Tomer Peretz. For Kozlov, it was like therapy.
Over time, Kozlov opened up more to his fellow artist, and the two created a connection, Peretz told The Epoch Times.
The two artists met through a mutual friend. But forming relationships, Peretz said, “cannot be done in one-hour or two-hour sessions. Those things [need] to be done by a connection.”
Peretz understands the path through processing trauma. He lived in Israel and experienced terrorist attacks.
As a soldier, he saw people die. And he helped with ZAKA, a volunteer search-and-rescue group in Israel, after Hamas attacked the country on Oct. 7, 2023.
“The words ‘art therapy’ sometimes make me laugh, to be honest with you, because I don’t think even people understand what kind of therapy these people need,” Peretz said. “These people don’t need sessions. These people don’t need the therapist to sit in front of them and just talk to them.
“These people need to build up a very deep connection with people who went through a similar experience to themselves. Because if these people, those hostages, will sit in front of a [therapist] that didn’t go through that kind of a hell, it would never work.”
Kozlov says the time spent in Peretz’s studio allowed him to “reflect [on] all of this experience. When you think about what changed, how you changed, how people who [love] you changed all this time, what you missed, what you would like to say.”
The time in the studio with Peretz helped him heal, said Kozlov’s girlfriend of a few months, Yael Shanny.
“He expresses himself through this canvas,” she said. “And it’s helping him just to be who he is now, to be able to walk with us, talking, and just enjoy the rest of his life.”
Through his art, Kozlov now seeks to advocate for the Jewish state, as it has come under attack at home and abroad since the Oct. 7 attacks. He noted the ongoing wave of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic protests on U.S. college campuses and other places nationwide and around the globe.
That’s where he hopes his art can make a difference, he said.
“We can imagine something,” he said. “But to see it in real life, through my eyes, it [may help] somebody also. Maybe it will change somebody’s mind who is against Israel.”
He sees hatred for Jews as “a huge problem.”
Kozlov isn’t Jewish, but his paternal grandfather was. According to Jewish law, Jewish identity is matrilineal. Nonetheless, Kozlov has experienced anti-Semitism.
‘A Miracle’
Kozlov now splits his time between Israel and New York. He plans to pursue his dream of being a full-time artist.Eventually, he hopes to have studios in both places.
“Andrei’s work is the definition of art,” Friedman, who owns the Lux Contemporary art gallery in New York, wrote in a text message. “His ability to communicate things you can only feel when in one’s shoes is out of this world.
“I catch myself getting lost in each of his paintings for hours when I try to think about what Andrei must have felt [in] real time when all this was happening to him. This collection and his art was never supposed to be made. His life is a miracle—thus, so is his art.”
Kozlov speaks publicly about his story as a way to help raise money for Israeli soldiers, and he’s writing a book about his ordeal. He met with members of Congress to advocate for help in negotiating the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza and to talk about his artwork.
He recognizes that his post-captivity paintings express a mix of darkness and hope.
“I try to leave the main thought in people’s mind that there is still a light,” he said. “Even if a painting is full of darkness, everywhere you will be able to see some light and some hope that I saw all this time.”
