Robert Reich was born into a poor family of a Jewish peddler, Israel Feiwel Reich. As his Yiddish name suggests, he moved to Brno from the provinces of Austria-Hungary, which fell to Poland after the end of the First World War. That is why he preferred to be called Franz instead of Feiwel in Brno. He probably never dealt with the change of his citizenship and nationality after the establishment of Czechoslovakia.
The one-room apartment without a kitchen, with a shared toilet in the corridor, was called by later biographers of Robert Reich a residence in "the most proletarian part of the city". Perhaps this is why young Robert embraced the radical ideals of the Communist Party after graduating from high school. He worked as a railway clerk.
Shortly after the occupation, in October 1939, Brno Jews with Polish citizenship were included in a deportation transport organized from Vienna by the then budding architect of the murder of European Jews, Adolf Eichmann. Robert Reich was one of them.