In 2002 , the world lost one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived, but his real story began long before Hollywood. His name was Billy Wilder.

Born Samuel Wilder on June 22, 1906, in a small town in what is now Poland, he grew up Jewish in a world that was about to turn against him. His mother nicknamed him Billy — after Buffalo Bill Cody, the American frontier hero she adored. She had no idea how prophetic that name would become. Billy moved to Vienna, then to Berlin, where he built a career as a screenwriter — witty, sharp, unstoppable. He was going places.

Then on February 28, 1933, the Reichstag burned. The day after, Billy Wilder packed a single bag and left Germany. He knew what was coming. He left his mother behind. He left his stepfather behind. He left his grandmother behind. He told them to follow. They didn't.

Billy made it to Paris. Then to America. He arrived in Hollywood with eleven dollars in his pocket, speaking almost no English, sleeping on friends' floors, sharing a room with fellow exile Peter Lorre. He learned English by listening to the radio. He learned Hollywood by refusing to quit. Within a decade he was directing masterpieces. "Double Indemnity" - "Sunset Boulevard" - "Stalag 17" - "Some Like It Hot" - "The Apartment". Seven Academy Awards: a career that made the whole world laugh — built by a man carrying a grief most people never knew about, because when the war ended and Billy returned to Germany as a US Army colonel, he finally learned the truth: his mother had been murdered in a Nazi labor camp in 1943. His stepfather killed at a death camp in 1942. His grandmother died in a ghetto the same year. He had spent the war making movies in Hollywood while they died. He never forgave himself.

When Holocaust deniers attacked him in print, Billy Wilder wrote back in a German newspaper with one sentence: "If the concentration camps and the gas chambers were all imaginary — then please tell me. Where is my mother?" He had wanted his final film to be "Schindler's List" — as a memorial to them. Steven Spielberg made it instead. Billy praised it without reservation.

Billy Wilder died on March 27, 2002, aged 95. He came to America with eleven dollars and gave the world "Some Like It Hot". He made us laugh his whole life. He carried his loss every single day of it.