Fanny Kotev, née Bloch, stayed in Bad Kissingen for only a short time. She was born in Frankfurt/ Main on August 31, 1917 as the daughter of Josef Bloch and his wife Klara, née Pappenheimer. She had an older brother, Manfred. Her father came from Randegg near Konstanz/Lake Constance and had married Klara Pappenheimer from Dornheim, a suburb of Groß-Gerau, in Hesse in 1914. According to his wedding certificate, his profession was confectioner, in Fanny Bloch’s registration of her apartment in 1935, “props manager” is stated as her father’s profession.

So far, only little is known about Fanny Bloch’s life. She moved to Bad Kissingen at the beginning of March 1935 and worked as a nanny for his then 2 ½ -year-old son Josef in Norbert Grünebaum’s family. In October 1935, she already returned to Frankfort. She was still registered as living there in Fischerfeldstrasse in September 1936.

In 1937, Fanny moved to Italy and prepared for her emigration to Palestine in a Jewish religious group. Emigration from Fascist Italy, however, couldn’t be realised. Therefore, her parents and her brother tried to dissuade her from her emigration plans. They travelled to Italy to meet her and persuade her to come back to Germany. But Fanny had a more realistic view of the situation in Germany and couldn’t be dissuaded. She took her leave of her family, none of whom was to survive the Nazi Era. Shortly afterwards, Fanny went to Sweden where she spent another two years of preparation for life in Palestine. From there, she got to the Middle East by the overland route and found a new home in Kibbutz Beeroth (Beirot) Yitschak, a religiously shaped kibbutz that was in the south of Palestine then.  There, she got to know Siegfried Witkowski who had been born in Grajewo in Poland and been raised in Braunschweig/ Brunswick/ Germany. He had emigrated via Trieste to Palestine in 1936 and called himself Israel Kotov after his emigration. The two of them married then, in 1945. The couple had four children: two girls – Chagit and Riwka – and two boys – Chanoch and Yosi. In 1948, their kibbuz was destroyed in the War of Independence and later rebuilt in the vicinity of Tel Aviv. 

Fanny’s husband Israel was a man with many talents and interests. He worked as a land surveyor for ten years and also in agriculture and agricultural science. In addition, he was interested in religious issues and published two books in which he translated German authors such as Goethe and Schiller into Hebrew. Israel Kotev died in 1990. Fanny Kotev died two years later in September 1992 at the age of 75.
 

Fanny’s mother Klara and her brother Manfred were deported from Frankfurt/ Main to Minsk in November 1941 and murdered there. Her father Josef’s fate remains a mystery. In the well-known memorial books (Yad Vashem and Bundesarchiv Koblenz), Frankfort/ Main is noted as his place of death, and August 8, 1941 as his date of death. Bundesarchiv Koblenz at the same time mentions a deportation to Auschwitz/ Oświęcim extermination camp, which appears to be very questionable though. And what is more, there is also an entry of death in the Frankfurt Registry Office, according to which Josef Bloch was run down by a car and killed in Frankfort on August 8, 1941. Fanny, who called herself Chedva Kotev after her emigration and marriage, applied for adequate memorial sheets at Yad Vashem for the three family members in 1955.