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This case study examines the psychological repercussions of socially-driven disasters; the aim is to show how the collapse of meta-social guarantees undermines narcissistic construction. External and internal envelopes are put drastically to the test following repeated exiles occurring after catastrophic disruptions of different kinds. Based on an analysis of a woman’s biographical narrative of her past as a baby hidden during the Shoah, we explore a survivor’s ability to tell her own story and recount her relatives’ story following different catastrophic disruptions. A sufficiently stable new social meta-framework provided by a host country can nurture substantial identity reajustment, favouring subjective differentiation: this enables a break from the alienating pacts of the family group of origin and a distancing from a traumatic past that haunts the family survivors. We try to show how remembering the past restores narcissistic contracts that have been drastically put to the test.