SAR 18#6

By Leszek Erenfeicht
For years on end it was but a legend.
With just a few words about it and
even fewer photographs known thereof,
two were repatriated; then a gunsmith
from Poznan started to manufacture
replicas of it. The Maroszek self-loading
rifle was resurrected at last.
The uncertainty of even the very
existence of such a rifle ended in 1974
when a letter arrived at the Polish Army
Museum in Warsaw from an Arizona-based
American gun collector containing
several photographs of a rifle
nobody had seen before – but some
had heard of. The sender was the late
Robert Faris, and the photos were
showing an unknown self-loading rifle,
s/n 1048, of his collection. He bought it
from another gentleman with the understanding
that this was a Czech weapon
for the description on top of the receiver
said “Zbr.2” like ‘Zbrojovka’ and there
were stamps showing a ‘Z in circle’ all
over the rifle – exactly like Czechoslovak
stamps. Then Mr. Faris undertook
research in Dr. Miroslav Sada’s book on
Czechoslovak small arms, published in
Prague in 1971, and found not a sign of
any weapon similar to that. When after
a year or two he found similar ‘Z in circle’
stamps all over the Polish wz.35 anti-tank
rifle, a thought finally dawned on
him – ‘What if that one is Polish as well?’
And so he wrote his letter to the museum
on the other side of the Iron Curtain
to find out.
For more than a year he didn’t get
any answer for the addressees were no
less at a loss than he was. They then
contacted the Warsaw-based historian
of Polish interwar armament industry,
the late Mr. Leszek Komuda, and finally
he had the answer: ‘That looks like the
Maroszek rifle, but let me ask Mr. Maroszek.”
Józef Maroszek, the designer
of both the wz.35 anti-tank rifle and the
wz.38M self-loading rifle was still alive
then, retired from his teaching career at
the Warsaw Technological University,
SAR Vol. 18, No. 6 74 Nov., Dec. 2014