CRISIS IN THE PERSIAN GULF : Hopes for Release of Family, Ailing Child, Fade Quickly : Relatives: A Baghdad pledge turns empty when communications with the detained Americans are cut.

For several hours, thanks to a televised interview by ABC News, freedom appeared tantalizingly near for a family of four Americans--including a 6-month-old infant with a serious medical condition--detained by the Iraqi government.

But on Thursday, a day after Iraqi Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz promised ABC correspondent Ted Koppel that he would look into the family’s situation, communications between the detained Americans and the outside world were closed off, leaving relatives in the United States confused and depressed.

“We were high after the program last night, but we’re kind of down in the dumps today,” said Ed Bazner of Palm Desert, whose son, Kevin, daughter-in-law, Dawn, and their two children, Elizabeth, 6, and David, 6 months, are among the 38 American citizens who remain locked in a Baghdad hotel.

Kevin Bazner and his family have been living in Malaysia for the past two years and were traveling there on a British Airways flight that had stopped to refuel in Kuwait. Bazner is a vice president for A&W; Restaurants International.

Young David Bazner suffers from a hernia that requires continual medical attention and possibly surgery. Koppel, who succeeded in visiting the Oberoi Rashid Hotel where the family was being held, pressed the Iraqi official during an interview Wednesday night for assurances that the case would be studied.

Aziz agreed before communications between detainees and the State Department were cut off Thursday morning, and Americans being held in Kuwait were ordered to report to two hotels in the capital, possibly for long-term internment.

“We’re all very concerned,” the elder Bazner, a retired Ford Motor Co. manager, said. “It really got to my wife this morning. She’s really down in the dumps. I’ve got her in bed and hope she can sleep.”

The family’s plight was just a part of the ordeal many American families were facing as they awaited word from relatives trying to flee Iraq and Kuwait. A few of the lucky ones got out.

T. P. Bryant Jr., 40, of San Antonio, Tex., was one of seven who escaped from the outskirts of Kuwait city, the Kuwaiti capital, in two stolen cars. Bryant said the group fled at speeds of 90 m.p.h., winding through the stifling desert heat to elude the Iraqi army.

“For the first 15 kilometers through the desert we could see tanks and soldiers off 4 or 5 miles to either side of us,” Bryant, a retired U.S. Army major, told reporters in Houston. “As we got closer to the border, we began seeing more and more. We physically made a dash through two tank lines that, as we were passing through, we could see they were beginning to slough their turrets trying to get a fix on us.”

No shots were fired, however, and the escapees--six Americans and one Australian--pushed on until they met a man on a camel who directed them to a Saudi Arabian military base.

“I think we were very lucky,” Bryant said. “I think God was watching over us.”

Fritz Bruggemeier, 42, a businessman from Toledo, Ohio, also escaped from Kuwait, traveling in a three-car caravan about 500 miles in order to reach Saudi Arabia. He and his companions, six Americans and two Britons, were turned away by Iraqi guards at one point on the Saudi border but found another place to cross.

Bruggemeier enjoyed an emotional reunion with family members Thursday at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.

A similar reunion was expected late Thursday as Pam Tobin of East Lansing, Mich., prepared to welcome her younger sister, Michelle, 29, who was on her way home with three children, ages 7, 5 and 2, after being shot at by Iraqi guards while crossing the border from Kuwait. The family was hoping that Michelle’s Kuwaiti husband, Jawad, 39, would soon follow.

“Needless to say, we’re extremely happy about this,” Pam Tobin said. “Michelle said . . . they were very lucky to get out.”

For many waiting families, however, there was no word whatsoever.

Fine Arts Professor Margit Omar of Los Angeles was waiting by her phone for word from her 22-year-old son, Rayed.

Edwin Davis of Los Angeles, a minister at the Koran Baptist church, had not heard from his daughter, Martha, or her husband and teen-age children, since Aug. 2, the day of the Iraqi invasion into Kuwait. The family was vacationing in Kuwait, but Davis said he has no clue as to their whereabouts now.

Similarly, Conrad Gicking of Arlington, Tenn., had last heard from his daughter, Denise Lynn Ali, on the day of the invasion. Ali had been in Kuwait city with her 1-year-old son and her Kuwaiti husband.

Gicking says his daughter has probably heard about the Iraqi order on Thursday for Americans in Kuwait to go to the hotels--one of which is the Kuwait International Hotel--but, he added, “I hope she had sense enough not to.”

Times researchers Lianne Hart, in Houston, Tracy Shryer, in Chicago, and Edith Stanley, in Atlanta, contributed to this story.