the boy in the yellow t-shirt*
2020-12-07 … Snopes on the boy and Ugur Sahin, CEO of BioNtech:
Although the family shown in the photograph is not Sahin’s, and the boy in the yellow shirt is not him, the milieu it depicted may well have been similar to the one in which Sahin grew up. According to multiple reports, Sahin’s father — like the father of the “boy in the yellow t-shirt” — immigrated to Germany as a gastarbeiter (“guest worker”) in a Ford factory in Cologne. Both men originally arrived by themselves, before their respective families later joined them.
The purpose of the guest-worker programs was to bring an influx of skilled labor into Germany in order to revive the German economy in the 1960s and 1970s. Workers were originally intended to stay for only two years, before returning to their countries of origin, but the rules were later changed and allowed for family reunification in Germany.
So in the case of Sahin and the boy in the yellow shirt, their families’ journey in German society began under the same legal mechanisms, and in similarly modest circumstances.*