‘Words are not enough’

Andrei Kozlov really doesn’t want to talk about what happened to him in Gaza.

He’s living in New York right now, painting, preparing to show his work; he’s working with Michael Wildes, the immigration attorney who’s also the mayor of Englewood, to secure the kind of visa that will allow him to pursue that goal. (Mr. Wildes and his firm have been helping many Israelis, including former hostages, with immigration issues.)

He’s happy to talk about his life before he was kidnapped from the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, and held hostage in Gaza for eight months, and he’s happy to talk about his life since then. He told his story, minutely and chillingly detailed, to such media outlets as the Times of Israel and the New York Times soon after he was liberated on June 8, 2024.

But now he just doesn’t want to talk about it. He’s told the story so many times that by now it feels like he’s a recording device and someone’s pressed his play button. When he tells the story in words, it’s rote. The way that he tells it now, he says, is through his art.

Mr. Kozlov, 28, was born in Saint Petersburg; he learned English, which he speaks with a heavy accent but a clear and accurate understanding of what he’s saying, starting in middle school. He graduated from university with a degree in marketing and PR; he wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted to do, but he knew that he wanted to experience the world before he did it.

Why did he start with Israel?

He’s been interested in the country for some time, he said. “I always visited my Jewish grandfather, and whenever I was at their place he was on Skype with relatives from Petach Tikvah. I heard about Israel all the time. I was surrounded by news about Israel.

“And also I just didn’t feel like I wanted to stay in one country. I wanted to be a man of the world, and Israel seemed a good place to start.”

So he did. He left Russia at the beginning of September 2022. That was just about six months after Vladimir Putin’s Russian army invaded Ukraine, in what the Russians mistakenly thought would be a cakewalk to victory. As we all know, that was a mistake. That war still is grinding on.

“It was just a coincidence that they had just started to draft people from the street and send them to Ukraine,” Mr. Kozlov said. “The mobilization happened on September 21, 2022. I left just three weeks before.”

Was that the result of strategic planning? No, Mr. Kozlov said. “No one knew it would happen.” It was just a lucky move.

Once he got to Israel, he took an ulpan course. Now, he said, his Hebrew is good enough for him to have a conversation if the other person is willing to speak slowly and to be patient. “But I have been in ulpan extreme in Gaza,” he added.

“The Mirror”

When he first got to Israel, Mr. Kozlov was on a tourist visa; then he did the government-funded Masa program, which places people in internships. “I spent 13 months in Israel,” he said. The first seven were as a student. “And then I got my citizenship,” he said. “I became an Israeli.

“I rented an apartment. I understood that this was the beginning of my time in Israel. I didn’t know if I wanted to spend three years there, or five, or seven, or 10, but I knew that I needed to learn a new language, to make money, to make new friends, to make some connections, to build my life. I decided that it didn’t matter how much time I would spend there, but I had to learn Hebrew, and to get as much work as I could.

“I was just beginning a new chapter of my life — and suddenly it was interrupted by Hamas.”

As he told reporters at the time, Mr. Kozlov was working security, unarmed, at the Nova music festival when he was kidnapped; he was shoved into a car by a man with an assault rifle whom he first took to be an Israeli special ops guy. He was wrong. It was Hamas.

Mr. Kozlov was held hostage with two other men, Almog Meir Jan and Shlomi Ziv. For the first two months of their eight-month ordeal, they were shackled and moved from place to place, told they were about to die and then allowed to live. They were starved, and they were terrorized. Then they were taken into an apartment, where they continued to be starved and terrorized but not moved.

The main figure in the apartment, who lived there with his family, was Abdallah Aljamal, whom Hamas described as a journalist but Israel said was a terrorist who occasionally freelanced. As Isabel Kershner write in the Times on July 12, 2024, “Mr. Aljamal … was writing regular dispatches for The Palestine Chronicle, a U.S.-based online publication, about the war’s terrible human toll on Gazans, as he was holding three kidnapped Israelis at gunpoint in his family’s apartment.”

The Israeli prisoners were held in one room of the apartment, with the window covered and guards constantly on the other side of the blanket that walled it off from everything else. The men were not starved there, Mr. Kozlov said.

“Mr. Kozlov appeared relaxed and often joked about his experience during the interview,” Ms. Kershner wrote. “But the humor was black, and the atmosphere he described was one of unrelenting menace.”

On July 8, Israeli commandos stormed the apartment, rescuing the three men and another hostage, Noa Argamani, who had been held nearby. Aljamal, his wife, his father, and his grandfather died in the raid.

According to Ms. Kershner’s Times story, doctors at the Sheba Medical Center said that the four had “wasted muscles, were suffering from severe malnourishment and had been abused, physically and psychologically, in various ways.”

Mr. Kozlov had loved to paint since he was child, but before he was taken hostage, “a couple of years before I went to Israel, I was a motion designer, and I did some digital art. I created a few pieces just for myself, just to practice Photoshop. And I did some painting for my dad. He is a big fan of mine. I did a still life for him that he still has.”

(Mr. Kozlov’s father is still in Saint Petersburg. His mother moved to Israel after October 7, and his brother soon followed her there.)

“The Gift”

When he was held in the apartment, he started drawing. “I did a lot of art in Gaza,” he said. “In January, they gave me a notebook. An empty album, with maybe 16 pages. And a pencil. So I started to draw. I also had some extra paper, so when I was finished I had made 25, maybe even 30 different drawings.”

Wait. Why did they give him a notebook? “Because I asked for one,” he said simply. “They brought it to me.

“They could have kept us in chains all the time, but we were in chains only for two months, and then they took them off.” In fact, as he described in other interviews, the way the captors moved casually between cruelty and near-decency was unpredictable, and that caused its own terror.

“Some of my drawings were just from my head. Nothing interesting. Characters from movies, like the Harlequin, or Jack Sparrow from “Pirates of the Caribbean,” or Don Corleone from “The Godfather.” Those were just from my imagination.

“But I did a series of drawings about the emotions I felt in Gaza. Nostalgia, happiness, anger, disappointment, frustration, hopelessness. I started the series with a portrait of myself, wearing pants, on my knees, in front of a source of bright light. I was ready for freedom.

“And I put a date in the corner of every drawing, so I could track how much time had passed.”

But he doesn’t have those drawings now. “Unfortunately, I couldn’t bring them with me when the IDF interrupted us,” he said. “We were expecting maybe to be released in a few months” — that is, during those periods when they weren’t sure that they’d be executed — “but we got out of there so fast. It was crazy.”

Mr. Kozlov spent the rest of June, July, and August of last year “with my family,” he said. “All of us. We were all together. And then my father left for Russia and I came to New York, and got incredibly inspired, and I started to paint.”

Where does he think of as home now? “Right now, I don’t know where my home is,” he said. “My real home is in Saint Petersburg, the place where I spent most of my life. Israel also became my home. I miss Tel Aviv a lot.

“I don’t miss Eilat, though. It’s 100 degrees there in the summer. It is like crazy there. But I miss Tel Aviv. And I miss Israel, which became home. But most of all I miss Saint Petersburg.”

It’s not likely that he’d go back there, at least not while Russia still is at war with Ukraine. “Going back could be risky,” he said.

Now, “I’m trying to explore New York,” he said. “I’m trying to get as much experience of New York as I can.” He’s looking forward to exhibiting his work, but he can’t plan it until he has his visa.

“Fallen Angel”

As for his art, “I use only acrylic on canvas now, so I consider myself a painter,” he said. “Maybe in the future I’ll make a few sculptures, but for now I’m just painting.”

His work now is “to recreate some of the experiences I had in Gaza, and to share my story with the world.

“I’m pretty tired of speaking about it. I always tell the same story. I’m asked the same questions and have the same answers. But for me, painting is really like art therapy. It really helps me overcome all this shit that happened to me, and to feel some positive emotions.

“When I am in the studio, I always try to find the music. I get great satisfaction from doing art. I can create something. I have some skills. I can say that I have some talent. I see my own results.”

He’s changed and grown as an artist, Mr. Kozlov said. “I see something that I created in September, and something that I created a few weeks ago, and there is a big difference.

“Sometimes I want to edit every painting that I made, but it needs to be the way that it is, so that everybody can see the progress. So that I can see the progress.”

Mr. Kozlov plans to have 12 paintings in the series, and he thinks that he will finish it in June. “I have thought about the concept of them really a lot. I understand that all of them will be about different emotions. Every painting is about different situations. Some of them are episodes of things that happened, and others are my interpretation of what I felt.

“I tried to give every painting different feelings, so that people will understand what our situation was. They can understand more than they could just with words. The words are not enough. The words are just on autopilot. It is a script that I turn on. Okay, okay, okay. I need to tell this story — and I already have told this story.

“The paintings tell the story much better than I do. They don’t tell everything, but people can understand them. Sometimes I invite someone to my studio, and they are like, ‘Oh. Oh. It was like that? Oh.’ And I don’t even say any words. They already understand it. It is a good sign when I invite somebody and they are, like, ‘Whoa.’”

The paintings are pretty big, he said; they’re mostly 48 by 72 inches. “I’d like to sell them. Hopefully somebody will buy them, and they will travel, and then maybe it would be a good decision for the buyer to donate them to a museum in Tel Aviv, or to any museum in Israel.”

Mr. Kozlov might make a few more paintings about Gaza, he said, but then that will be enough. “I don’t want to be only the painter who was in Gaza, and who can tell the story only of Gaza. I have different thoughts, about other things, and I’d like to explain them in another collection in a year or two.

“I don’t want to be the guy who paints only about Gaza.

“When I was in Gaza, I promised myself that I would use my talents,” Mr. Kozlov said. “So I am keeping my word.”