[1] Zenkova was born on 22 December 1923 to a Belarusian peasant family in Ushaly village, located within the present-day Shumilina District in the Vitebsk Region of Belarus.

[2] After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, Zenkova initially worked in civil defense activities, rescuing people from collapsed buildings and removing unexploded ordnances from streets and rooftops.

Not long after arriving in her hometown of Ushaly, German forces took control of the area and began seizing the villagers' property, especially food and livestock.

While she was eager to join the ranks of the partisan detachment named after Kliment Voroshilov, which her brother was a member of, but in March 1942, she was asked by the detachment's commissar to form a Komsomol cell near the strategically important railroad junction in Obol, five kilometers away from Ushaly to provide them with information on German military activities in the area.

[3] In August 1943, one of the group's members, 17-year-old Zinaida Portnova, managed to get a job working in the kitchen of a German mess hall, and subsequently poisoned the soup that was being prepared, killing dozens of enemy soldiers.

When Zenkova was provided with magnetic mines, she found creative ways to hide them for delivery, even baking one info a loaf of bread to avoid detection.