The author tried a CZ 75 Champion in the factory’s shooting tunnel and liked it a lot.

The old men still hunt mushrooms after a rain. They move silently through the oaks, maples and chestnuts, searching independently. Their step is slow and deliberate, as befits old men. They grasp wire baskets. The first coughs a greeting. I don't speak Czech, so I nod a reply. The fourth prods ground cover with a walking stick not far from his car, a blue Skoda. He does not look up. He is probably old enough to remember the rumble of Nazi Panzers.

The road snakes past log decks, many and small, stacks of short-cut pines and hardwoods. It is not the broad, firm thoroughfare that, in another life, I threaded with 40 tons of timber straining the bunks of my Peterbilt. This road is narrow, soft. Perhaps after a few days of sun it will bear a one-ton flatbed. Mainly, I suspect, it has endured the hooves of horses and perhaps small tractors. This rolling wood north of Uhersky Brod has not seen heavy steel.

A hundred kilometers above the nearest Austrian border checkpoint and 240 northeast of Vienna, Uhersky Brod lies just 25 kilometers from Slovakia. Well east of Germany, it seemed a good place, in 1936, for the Czech government to move its primary arms factory.

Company historian Milan Kubele favors the Model 75 Compact, a highly regarded variant of CZ’s flagship pistol.

"The original CZ plant was in Strakonice, far to the west," says Milan Kubele. Now retired, he worked for the company for 30 years, beginning in 1972. His English is excellent, his knowledge of CZ history encyclopedic. "Hitler's intentions were clear to us in Eastern Europe long before they took root beyond the English Channel." Milan smiles ruefully. "It seems CZ is also misunderstood by the West."

To be fair, he concedes, the story is complicated by Brno, another Czech name familiar to many American shooters. If I give him at least an hour without interruption, he says, he'll lay it all out plainly. I can hardly refuse.

He tells me that Zbrojovka Brno produced rifles for the government in the central Czech town of Brno before World War I. "In 1919 it became Jhoceska' Zbrojovka and in 1921 Ceska Zbrojovka. That translates to 'Czech armsmaker.' To augment post-war rifle output at the Brno facility, CZ took root in Strakonice, from where it produced CZ 22, 24, 26, 27, 28 and 38 pistols. However, the current CZ company does not have records of these pistols. Though the corporate names are identical, the organizations are not the same. In fact, the original Strakonice CZ got its direction from headquarters in Prague."