Experienced collectively, disasters are also remembered collectively. Constituting a social glue among affected communities, disaster memories are essential for recovery processes. Focusing on teachers, who became frontline disaster workers, this paper explores how disasters are experienced and managed by a professional group lacking emergency management training. The study draws on in-depth interviews with school teachers about their memories of a forest fire in Sweden in 2014. As residents in, or close by, a small, rural community close to the fire, the teachers experienced the fire both as professionals and as citizens in their roles as family members and neighbours. The paper explores the role of kinship and vicinity of community reflecting the concepts of Therapeutic community and Gemeinschaft to provide a more substantial understanding of the social structures of a small, rural community without previous experiences of a disaster. The second theoretical focus and consequential contribution of the study lies within the teacher's recollections of professionalism, and how such interlinked norms and values remained intact through the disaster. In addition to convergence concerning professional ideals in the teacher collective, there was divergence in the teachers' memories of their performance and how others valued them, outlining how the social context and organizational support structures have tangible impacts on individuals' memories. Findings enable further systematic exploration of post-disaster social structures, training and organizational support, as well as the role of professional ideals, in disaster recovery processes.